1-Man IT Department

Interviewed by the Fresh Ubuntu podcast

Yesterday, I was interviewed by Harlem Quijano and Peter Nikolaidis from the Fresh Ubuntu podcast. I have been a fan of Fresh Ubuntu for quite some time, and it was an honor for them to ask me to be on. We had a good time, and I got to give a brief overview of GTD and how it may evolve technologically speaking.

Peter has began to practice GTD, and Harlem was interested in what it was all about. Hopefully, I will be able to make a return appearance so that we can delve into some more GTD topics a little more in-depth.

For now, you can go the Fresh Ubuntu site to listen: http://urltea.com/31av

Thanks to Harlem and Peter for a great time. And I hope to join them again soon.

Michael

Popularity: 43% [?]

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.

Ubuntu Twitterers join @pulseofubuntu

Ubuntu member, Jorge Castro, put up a great writeup about a new movement to consolidate the growing number of Ubuntu twitterers. I know that Christer Edwards and Dan Trevino were some of the first folks to talk about setting this up.

From Jorge’s blog:

One random day Christer Edwards said something along the lines of “we should organize all Ubuntu people on twitter and put that to good use.” Poor Christer made the mistake of having a great open ended idea, so I convinced him to implement it. :)


Pulse of Ubuntu is a twitter account that follows people around from the Ubuntu community. As you can see, there’s already a good list of people being followed.

You can check out the Pulse of Ubuntu site to see the conglomeration of Ubuntu folks. Not everything said directly relates to ubuntu. Maybe there is a way to parse it out by using hashtags (#ubuntu). I am an idea man, and not a programmer, so I will leave that up to smarter people than me. **hint hint Christer **

Back with a Vengeance!

Well, not really a vengeance because I am not really mad at anything. I have decided to try to kick start my blogging career on both my tech blog (what you are reading) as well as my productivity blog. I am starting here, with 1-ManIT, because there have been a lot more changes in my life in this area then any other. I will hit some of the highlights now with more meaningful posts in the following days.

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

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.

Ubuntu Linux and Compiz Fusion: A Match Made in Heaven

I have recently decided to drop Windows from my life (at least at home). I have chosen Ubuntu linux to be my desktop OS of choice. I found a lot of YouTube vids detailing the use of Ubuntu and Compiz Fusion that have peaked my interest in trying it out.

This is one of the better ones (minus the obvious Hillary Duff fascination the guy has).

Popularity: 68% [?]

StillSecure, and still on top!

I just wanted to give a quick CONGRATS to Alan and Mitchell at StillSecure. While perusing my copy of WindowsIT Pro last night, I ran up on the article “Guard Your Network with Software NAC”. I read the opening and found that StillSecure’s Safe Access product was being reviewed against offerings from Sophos, InfoExpress and McAfee.

The article shows the strengths and weaknesses of using a software-based NAC (that is Network Access Control) to protect your network. NACs evaluate each device plugged into a network against a set of rules/filters and decide if that device is allowed full access to your network. If it does not meet the standards that you have set for the network, the device is quaranteened until it can be brought up to standards.

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.)

My State of the Network

I have decided to lay out some of the basics of my network at my job. Read forth with caution because it is not pretty. Please leave and and all suggestions that you have for me to make my network better and especially more secure. I have a Grand Vision in my head of what I want the network to be like. Now it is just getting the money, time and knowledge to get it all in place.

I have been at my job since Jan 2006. It is the first network administration job that I have had. I have come from the desktop support arena that dabbled in the network area. When I got here, our entire City Hall network was running on an old Compaq Proliant ML350 with 40GB hard drive. It had Novell 5.1 as the NOS, Groupwise 6.5 for email for 85+ users, Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate 8, ARCserve 6 for our single tape backup and the file server for 30+ users. The backup had not for the 2+ months prior to my arrival, which was revealed when our Sales Tax database got corrupted before my arrival [who would have thought a 300+MB Access database would corrupt!].