Security+

I added a new certification to my belt this morning. The CompTIA Security+, which covers basic security concepts. While about 70% of the content was already known to me, from experience, there was some valuable information in it. I probably should have gone for the SSCP® – Systems Security Certified Practitioner certification, as it has more recognition but I didn’t do this to become a security expert. My goal was to add something to my CV that showed I was conscious of security issues in my day to day work.

Most of my posts these days relate to training or certifications I have done. I am in between mandates and I try to use this time wisely, gaining knowledge that I hopefully will be able to apply in future mandates!

Posted in Technical | No Comments »

MCITP: Enterprise Administrator

Well, I have passed the Windows 7 exam yesterday and have completed the requirements for the MCITP certification. 14 years after completing the MCSE on NT4, I did it again. Should have done the upgrade exams

While the certification itself has some value, it’s more the understanding and discovery of some obscure features that I enjoy reading about while studying. Windows 7 was really fun.

I look forward to deploying it this year (I hope) and seeing the impact it will have on support staff. Is it more stable? Easier to troubleshoot and deploy? Looks like it to me. Time will tell

Posted in Technical | No Comments »

2010 Career Plans

While 2009 had it’s share of challenges, I am very motivated this year to make myself a better IT architect, more versatile and more marketable.

I have started in December by updating my Microsoft credentials, since a large majority of corporate environments use their products. So i focused on Windows 2008 and Windows 7 as well as maintaining my VMware certification (since 2.x) and adding Hyper-V to the virtualization toolkit.

I intend to work on various certifications this year, like CompTIA’s Security+, and possibly the CCNA. I have am not planning on becoming an expert in either field for now, but demonstrating overall knowledge in various related fields definitely adds depth to the architect profile I have and want to project to clients.

I hope this year will bring great projects and stimulating environments!

Posted in Technical | No Comments »

Another certification…

Well, while I have been a long time supporter of VMware, new players are playing in that field now and I felt I had to take a look. While doing my latest certifications, I set up an Hyper-V server and experimented with it. While I feel the product is still not at the level of the vSphere line of products, there is definite improvement. I have to admit that I am a bit biased towards VMware, as I love the product. But Hyper-V being Windows based feels too…. easy (not a bad thing!).

Being that most concepts are pretty much the same as VMware, I’m tackling the Microsoft 70-652 Virtualisation exam this morning. Next step is Windows 7 to complete the MCITP in January.

Update: Passed the exam, it was pretty easy, as expected. Windows 7 might be a bit more of a challenge!

Posted in Technical | No Comments »

Close call…

Well, my turn to make a stupid mistake… Well actually, I took a risk, and it backfired.

I am hosting my virtual servers on a QNAP TS419P iSCSI NAS, which has disk redundancy, etc… I needed to reconfigure the array, so I moved all my VMs locally to one of the ESX servers, and I made a backup on the 2nd ESX box (to play it safe). I proceeded to reconfigure the array.

A few days passed and I sort of left things as they were (everything was running so…) Since I am studying for a bunch of Microsoft exams, I figured I should build a HyperV server. Since I have only two physical machines, I decided to use one of the ESX servers and reconfigured it to HyperV. While I was having fun playing with HyperV, setting up new servers etc, I overlooked all my servers that were hosted on my now single ESX box with no backups. Guess what….

Hard disk failure on Sunday.

I lost both my domain controllers, the mail server, this webserver hosting 2 sites and some tests boxes. I have backup jobs running to export the mail server’s configuration daily so I was able to recover that easily, and for some strange reason I backed up the website folders last friday. I overlooked the MySQL database however and had no more content for the blog.

I was able (by a miracle) to recover the web server from the failed disk (it booted just long enough for me to copy the server from the failed disk’s datastore to the new instance of ESX I rebuilt, so I managed to save the database!

Lesson learned: Never leave anything important running with no redundancy

Posted in Technical | No Comments »