1-Man IT Department

Things on my Mind

Hello again from the Deep South of Alabama. It has been 9 days since my last update so I thought that I would jot down some things that I have been thinking about lately.

Forgot to Mention:

I did forget to mention in my last post that I successfully completed the requirements for attaining my first IT certification. I talked about it in some previous posts that I was attending the SANS Institute’s Security Essentials Bootcamp in Sept 2007. In February of 2008, I took the requisite two tests and passed with flying colors (90 and 89). So now I am a GIAC Security Essentials Certified (GSEC) professional. I was quite excited since it is my first certification. My next goal is to get a Cisco CCNA. I am putting 4 new Cisco routers in my enterprise so I think that I need to get proficient in using them. I would like to complete the study for this cert in 2008 and have the cert by the end of the 1st quarter of 2009.

SANS Training Updates not forgotten

I have not forgotten to finish the SANS Security Essentials recaps. I was preoccupied the nights of the 4th thru 6th days of the training. I will fill this in, hopefully this weekend so that the whole series is complete.

Popularity: 77% [?]

Security Bootcamp - Day 3

Well, what can I say about today. At the end of it, we will be halfway through our course books. Today was a lot of fun for me. We talked about a lot of stuff that I did not know anything about. So let’s just jump into it.

Day 3 - Internet Security Technologies

Security Essentials - Day 2 Defense-In-Depth

Well, another day, another 500+ book to go through in Security Training.

Today was Defense-In-Depth day at Security Essentials Bootcamp. I really enjoyed today a lot. We finished the fundamental stuff yesterday and started hitting the ground cracking (literally).

We started with a discussion of what Defense-In-Depth entailed. We hit on multiple layers of protection, the CIA Triad, risk management and the differences between threat and vulnerabilities. Then we began a rather lengthy talk about the differences between viruses, worms and trojans, and hit on some of the big hitters from years past…Melissa, Sasser, Slammer…ahhh, the good ole days. After a brief overview of malware and it effects, we moved on to the next section.

SANS Security Essentials Bootcamp Day 1

I am spending this week traveling to Birmingham, Alabama to attend the SANS Community Event that is teaching SEC401 - Security Essentials Bootcamp. The class is me and 23 others from all over the country. Most are from Alabama, but there are some from my home state of Louisiana (Louisiana Lottery Corp.) a couple from Georgia (including one gent who had to wear his University of Georgia Coachs shirt today, argh!), and then individuals from Arkansas, North and South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee. The class is being taught by Matt Pierce who is the Security Administrator at AdTran in Huntsville, AL.

When we each arrive at the hotel, we are greeted with a black zippered bag with the SANS logo on it. When I lifted mine up, I thought that I had thrown my back out again. I looked down and saw 6 books that are each at least 2″ thick in them. Upon closer inspection, there was one book for each day, and they are each at least 500 pages. WOW! That is over 3000 pages of documentation for this training course.

A Long and Winding Road

It has been awhile since I have posted here, and since I have been pinged a couple of times in the last couple of weeks, I figured that i needed to start posting here again. So a quick recap of things that have been happening to me since I posted last.

1. I have FINALLY released the bid for the server that will become our new Exchange 2007 Server at work. Working in local government, if I hit a specific amount ($7,500), I have to bid out the machine to at least 3 vendors. I released the bid on June 2, and I will open them on June 18, 2007. I am pretty excited aboout this moving on. This is the one project that needed to get going. We are using Novell Groupwise currently on a Novell 5.1 server that was not configured correctly (e.g. my SYS:Public dir is not at /sys/public it is in sys/mail/public…why, you ask…I have NO IDEA, but it has been this way for over 5 years). I had never spec’ed out an Exchange Server before so I severely underbudgeted for the project for this year. It may be that I get the hardware this year and the software next year first thing. I am getting the OS and Exchange Server software off of state bid, so there should not be any delay in getting it in October or November. (We start our FY in October.)

Thoughts on Beginning the Path to Security Professional

Over the past month, I have been fascinated with the Information Security (InfoSec) aspect of Information Technology (IT). I have been in IT for a long time, and have finally become a Network Administrator (NetAdmin) as my job. I have begun reading a number of security blogs and listening to security podcasts. My main source for security blogs is the Feedburner network, Security Bloggers Network, an aggregated feed of (currently) 66 security blogs in the blogosphere. There are a lot of great writer on that feed, and I have already learned a lot from this great resource.

Hello world!

This blog is a brand new venture for me. It will complement my other blogs: Black Belt Productivity, a blog I co-author about Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and Rammblings, my personal blog.

This will be my blog that deals with my life in Information Technology. I am now the Network Administrator for the City of Northport, a small municipality in Central Alabama. I am also beginning to realize that my IT passion lies in Information Security (InfoSec).

Currently, I am pursuing a number of certifications. I am going to get my CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ certifications in my initial stages.

I am a new MacBook Pro owner, as well as a long time Microsoft Windows user. My decision to get the Mac was made in part so that I could learn a lot more about Linux, as well as my noticing that a lot more Security Professionals are moving to the Mac OS X platform. I have moved my main desktop machine at home to Windows Vista. I do like it a lot, and I will be talking about more later.