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Cyber3xpert

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I'm very much interested in Information Technology and computer-related things like that. I was just wondering if anyone else here has the same interests; maybe a job in the field of computers? I also have, obviously, an interest in drones, and hope to maybe merge the two into a single job someday...
 
I've pretty much been an IT guy from the moment my parents bought our first computer which was the 8-bit Commodore64C, studied AI and CS at university and worked in IT most of my life. I've been in a senior support role covering a wide range of technologies for a good few years and this year I'm working on improving my infrastructure side just recently gaining my first CCNA qualification which I'm very pleased with after a very stressful revision time.

I still adore technology and it just amazes me what we have ready access to now with incredibly sophisticated and easy to fly drones, unbelievably powerful consumer PC's, virtual PC's, hugely capable cameras and of course all the power of a mobile phone in your pocket. It's difficult to explain how exciting it was when my parents bought our first video recorder and we could watch TV a different night from when it was on and watch it again whereas children the same age now can have a device in their pocket which can pretty much show them any TV show, film, book or music ever made.
 
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I've pretty much been an IT guy from the moment my parents bought our first computer which was the 8-bit Commodore64C, studied AI and CS at university and worked in IT most of my life. I've been in a senior support role covering a wide range of technologies for a good few years and this year I'm working on improving my infrastructure side just recently gaining my first CCNA qualification which I'm very pleased with after a very stressful revision time.

I still adore technology and it just amazes me what we have ready access to now with incredibly sophisticated and easy to fly drones, unbelievably powerful consumer PC's, virtual PC's, hugely capable cameras and of course all the power of a mobile phone in your pocket. It's difficult to explain how exciting it was when my parents bought our first video recorder and we could watch TV a different night from when it was on and watch it again whereas children the same age now can have a device in their pocket which can pretty much show them any TV show, film, book or music ever made.
I know, right? I'm a bit young to remember the video recorder, but I remember when we had a landline in the house for the kids, and we had a big, blocky TV that only got a few channels. I also remember when my parents got their first iPhone - it was the 3. They had blackberry's before that. Nowadays, laptops are the norm, but when PC's were a revolutionary idea, they were basically small TV's with a keyboard. Awhile ago 8MB of storage was the size of a shoebox, but now you can get 256GB of storage on a piece of plastic the size of your fingernail! It's amazing how far technology has come, from computers the size of buildings to little slips of glass and plastic we put in our pocket. I'm also excited about the new quantum processing technology available. D-Wave has a patented quantum processor; Google has a quantum computer, as well as IBM. Quantum computers are frightfully expensive, though. A quantum computer with one qubit of processing power costs around $10,000. Yeah, I think I'll wait to get one of those till they are a little less costly?
 
I'm a senior software engineer. I build web and mobile apps for a tech company in San Francisco. I've been a tech geek my entire life. Getting into drones (recently, like last week) has been a blast for me!
 
I'm in IT, been a senior systems engineer for a number of years with networking, virtual servers (mainly VMWare) and mail systems. I've gotten away from the recent advances in Exchange but most issues deal with internet mail delivery which is usually simple to troubleshoot if you understand the basics.
I've had my CCNA for years and finally obtained my CCNP last month a week before the program changed.
 
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I'm in IT, been a senior systems engineer for a number of years with networking, virtual servers (mainly VMWare) and mail systems. I've gotten away from the recent advances in Exchange but most issues deal with internet mail delivery which is usually simple to troubleshoot if you understand the basics.
I've had my CCNA for years and finally obtained my CCNP last month a week before the program changed.

I was the same with the CCNA sitting I think what was the very last ICND2 in the UK and involved a 600 mile round trip for the test centre which really piled on the pressure.

The question now is whether to proceed to a CCNP which work have offered to fund this year but I'm not sure, from what I've read it's a lot tougher than the CCNA and much more Cisco specific. On one hand if they're offering to pay for it then I should take advantage but I found the CCNA hard work and I'm not sure how useful the CCNP will be as I don't support beyond our routers which are not too complex. At the moment what I'd really like to work on is Cisco wireless and firewalls since that's definitely something I need for my job and a big gap at the moment.

Longer term I realise a CCNP is great for a CV but I work in a reasonably rural area with few large companies and the other big one here use Juniper rather than Cisco and the CCNP on its own is just a certification and needs experience to back it up.

As someone familiar with the certifications I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

A lot of the time I'm not keen on moving systems to the cloud but I don't miss having a local Exchange server. Years ago I joined a small company which had their Exchange server running on an old P2 400 (this was well into the P4 era) because no-one wanted to touch it since it worked. General performance was awful as you'd expect and restarting it was horrendous taking around 45 minutes of nail biting moments for it to get back into Windows and Exchange to be available.
 
Just retired, but spent most of my working life in tech one way or another, ending in 25 years of support work. As a manager for many of those years I was proud to promote the human side of support, helping the masses learn as we actually fixed their issues. That to me was the most rewarding part. When I started in the late 80's into computer tech, it seemed like all IT people were at little (or completely) arrogant. I spent my later days doing my best to end that notion.;) Its a ever quickening field to be in now, AI will end some avenues that were traditional career choices in IT.

As for meging wtih drone tech, my last CIO was quite interested in using drones to take inventory of huge lots of semi-trailers, but it was not practical given that most of the depots across the country were near airports. Sadly that was one dream that did not come true. If you want to chase something like that, look at Agriculture technology. Best wishes for your IT future.

p.s. reading above about the old Exchange server, I spent too many all nighters in freezing cold data centers waiting for Exchange databases to receover.... my MCSE was based on NT 4, those were the days..... uggh!
 
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That Exchange server was indeed good old NT4 and one of my first big IT jobs was moving offices and moving from an NT4 domain to a windows 2000 domain which seemed very new and shiny at the time. In my current company it was only a few years ago we got rid of our last NT4/DOS PCs which were embedded in machinery and isolated, whenever I had to use them it made me appreciate modern systems. The DOS PC needed a new touchscreen monitor with drivers that came on a CD so prepping the PC was a lot of work and even simple tasks like checking the com ports and speeds took time compared to plugging the monitor into a current PC and having it up and running in minutes. I will say it was immensely rewarding to get it working though.

On the other hand I built a new home PC just before Christmas which was a reasonably complex build but it all slotted together fine, Windows was up and running within minutes of it booting for the first time with most of the drivers installed as well. I'm so used to working with problems in technology that I kept expecting something to go wrong yet there's been no issues with it at all.
 
Been involved in IT since around 1998. Everything from DBA to system administration and software engineering.

I'm currently a full time senior software engineer and do some AWS devops work on the side.
 
Just retired, but spent most of my working life in tech one way or another, ending in 25 years of support work. As a manager for many of those years I was proud to promote the human side of support, helping the masses learn as we actually fixed their issues. That to me was the most rewarding part. When I started in the late 80's into computer tech, it seemed like all IT people were at little (or completely) arrogant. I spent my later days doing my best to end that notion.;) Its a ever quickening field to be in now, AI will end some avenues that were traditional career choices in IT.

As for meging wtih drone tech, my last CIO was quite interested in using drones to take inventory of huge lots of semi-trailers, but it was not practical given that most of the depots across the country were near airports. Sadly that was one dream that did not come true. If you want to chase something like that, look at Agriculture technology. Best wishes for your IT future.

p.s. reading above about the old Exchange server, I spent too many all nighters in freezing cold data centers waiting for Exchange databases to receover.... my MCSE was based on NT 4, those were the days..... uggh!
No remote access?
 
I was the same with the CCNA sitting I think what was the very last ICND2 in the UK and involved a 600 mile round trip for the test centre which really piled on the pressure.

The question now is whether to proceed to a CCNP which work have offered to fund this year but I'm not sure, from what I've read it's a lot tougher than the CCNA and much more Cisco specific. On one hand if they're offering to pay for it then I should take advantage but I found the CCNA hard work and I'm not sure how useful the CCNP will be as I don't support beyond our routers which are not too complex. At the moment what I'd really like to work on is Cisco wireless and firewalls since that's definitely something I need for my job and a big gap at the moment.

Longer term I realise a CCNP is great for a CV but I work in a reasonably rural area with few large companies and the other big one here use Juniper rather than Cisco and the CCNP on its own is just a certification and needs experience to back it up.

As someone familiar with the certifications I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

A lot of the time I'm not keen on moving systems to the cloud but I don't miss having a local Exchange server. Years ago I joined a small company which had their Exchange server running on an old P2 400 (this was well into the P4 era) because no-one wanted to touch it since it worked. General performance was awful as you'd expect and restarting it was horrendous taking around 45 minutes of nail biting moments for it to get back into Windows and Exchange to be available.
I've been watching training on the new CCNA through CBTNuggets. It appears the new CCNA is not as academic as in the past. There's debates as to what routing protocols are covered but clearly the main focus is with OSPFv2. However it now covers what used to be specializations such as wireless and automation, leaving the specializations and details to CCNP.

CCNA old or new will provide the fundamentals you'll need in networking for SoHo environments, especially if you're quite new to networks, having only dealt with some static routing. My first experience with CCNA back in 2006 introduced me to VLans and a respect for dynamic protocols.

I started in my CCNP track earlier this decade, having passed CCNPv2 routing, but stalled after that. It provided my first exposure to BGP and advanced concepts with OSPF. This became vital with my current job that has a multi-site enterprise network. It was because of my studies for CCNP Route that I understood what was causing a route issue with OSPF at a site when we changed our our MPLS implementation. I knew how to fix it (reset OSPF process), when to do it (outside production hours), and apply a workaround for current production hours until the fix could be implemented.
 
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