2024-12-07 16:54:00
I like to hang out on Discord. As we know, I like it a little bit too much.
This month, I was asked two questions which got me reminiscing about my career. About when I decided to quit IT, about when I almost lost my CISSP. And about how I've been doing things the past ten years.
First off, someone asked me:
"What was the worst job you had?"
The worst job I've had in IT was not a problem with the job, it was a problem with me.
The time I was at my lowest, was after my first five to seven years, around 2006. I was in contracting (as in I was employed by an agency who rented me out to customers), in a job where I was tape jockey and only did minor systems administration. I wasn't motivated to learn or expand, because my employer had a very strict development path where they demanded I first do a few certs that I really didn't want.
So I gave up. I hated that job, slacked off a lot, spent a lot of my time exploring the building instead of working.
And while I did that, I did night classes and one day a week at college to become a maths teacher. This I loved! Mostly because I was challenging myself and because I was working on getting out of IT.
In 2008 I finished my first year with full marks. I even finished a class from second year as well! And I had an internship lined up, so I could go into fulltime teaching. Then we learned we were having a kid and I had to go back to IT, because of money.
A good friend of mine helped me out. I started working with/for him, and really started challenging myself again... Lots of learning, lots of studying, doing difficult jobs again.
So... My worst job? It was when I gave up.
Today, after I told a little bit about my freelancing, someone else asked me:
"I know you've got a LOT of certs, would you say that made the biggest difference getting you to the position you're in now or was there another factor?"
I have 25 years of experience in IT, but somewhere around 2007 I decided to actually get out of IT. That didn't go as planned, but in 2008 I did get a nice "reset" of my career. I took what experience I had to get a solid job in contracting (not yet freelance) and from there on out started applying myself.
In 2009 I slowly started getting a few certifications, most importantly CISSP. That's what got me "qualified" for a few other security positions. After that though, I stupidly started slacking again. I even blogged about it then.
I managed to retain my CISSP, but I was still not really applying myself in "continuous improvement". I did some trainings here and there, listenend to podcasts, read books. In 2013 I'd had enough of that, kicked my own ass with the help of a good friend and made a plan.
Only 11 years ago did I start my "continuous improvement" journey. Every year, I make a list of goals to achieve by the end of the year. A list which grows and fills and shifts throughout the year, with things I feel I need to learn or research...
In 2013 I made sure to keep my CISSP and get my RHCSA. After that, it's been cycles of three years to renew CISSP, renew RHCE (the followup to RHCSA) and also renew other certifications. Plus do other trainings and certifications, which feed into the renewal cycles, but are also actually helpful.
As Auti says: it's the journey. I make a plan for every year, I do 2-3 courses and/or certifications every year. I make sure to keep learning new things.
On the one hand I do this, because I'm honestly afraid of becoming too "old and outdated" for the IT market. But I also do it because my customers value this attitude: I keep improving my value on the market, but staying in touch with tech and skills that are relevant and recent.
Plus I diversify: pentesting, Linux sysadmin, auditing, teaching/didactics, cloud. There are risks in generalizing as I do, but specialism isn't my thing.
kilala.nl tags: mentor,
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2024-12-06 23:11:00
In my Linux and DevSecOps classes, my students run a handful of virtual machines for their labs. We see all kinds of host OS configurations: Windows, MacOS, all kinds of Linuxen. And then there's both Intel, AMD and Apple CPUs. It makes for an interesting mish-mash.
In most cases we build a NAT network, which has the VMs in it. This shields the VMs from the rest of the network (keeping them safer), while still giving them Internet access.
Every hypervisor (virtualisation software) has its own approach for this. In VMWare it's almost by default that VMs end up in the same, shared NAT network. In VirtualBox you have to change the adapter connection from "NAT" to "NAT Network".
UTM on MacOS on aarch64 (Apple Silicon ARM) confounded me for quite a while. Unfortunately their documentation isn't perfectly clear on the subject. But, this week we got it to work!
To setup more than one VM, in UTM, in a shared NAT network, you do the following. For each virtual machine, go into the Networking configuration. Make these settings:
The networking configuration screen suggests that DHCP works out of the box, without configuration, but it doesn't. I have had to manually enter the information which was already in the boxes (but greyed out), to make it work.
Now when you boot the VMs, they will be in 10.0.2.0/24 and they'll get IPs starting at .15. They can ping each other, plus you can SSH to them directly from your MAC without needing any port forwards.
kilala.nl tags: studies, mentor,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.