Along with my regular duties at work and our after work activities, I am always trying to learn and grow more for my job. A good thing is that I actually enjoy the field I am in so whether I'm learning new software or working on my at home hardware, I'm happy and satisfied to continue my training. Here are some of my new and continuing projects from the last few months. Some of the work is not much different than what I do professionally (all be it smaller scale), much was new for me and for purposes of training towards various certifications.
I ran 15 network drops over three floors using standard practices as described by the BICSI guidelines for making, and running cat5b cables and termination.
Installed, labeled and tested the Ortronics 24 port patch panel for the network distribution frame.
Installed and configured two Cisco routers (Catalyst 1900e and 2900e) to enterprise standards.
Purchased, upgraded and repaired four Sun servers including a T5120. Installed and configured Solaris 10 operating systems on three machines and Solaris 8 one the remaining one. All O.S.'s are updated and fully patched
Installed and configured one SunRay 150 thin client and one SunRay 1G thin client terminal. I used the newest version of the SunRay server software 5 which also requires a successful installation and config of Java and Apache web server software.
Installed and configured 5 desktop Linux machines with Ubuntu and Red Hat distributions (all set to dual boot with Windows XP Pro). Also configured Samba software on all our Windows boxes for compatibility.
Installed and configured two NAS (network storage) and media streaming devices.
Setup RAID arrays for approx. 18 terabytes of drive space.
Updated two laptops for triple booting to Windows, Linux (Ubuntu) and Solaris 10 x86. One Linux/Windows netbook is a machine used for diagnostics and repairs for the entire "datacenter" and desktop environment. This also functions as a "Carputer" in my vehicle providing a full blown GPS system, OBDII vehicle diagnostics, XM radio, Bluetooth interface, video and audio delivered to a 10 inch touch screen in the dashboard.
I currently administer this system and do continual "tweaking" to improve performance and system reliability. While not quite an enterprise datacenter, it is amazing in that it does require almost as much maintenance to keep everything working as it should. It is a great platform to keep my datacenter and hardware skills up to date and dive deeper into the administration side of things. Using these components will also allow me to complete my Cisco network engineering certifications and finish up my Solaris 10 Admin 2 to match my other Sun certs.
Future plans for my lab will include the addition of a Cisco VoIP lab, a VPN firewall appliance, a web server (Cobalt or Bluecoat) and an official rack to put it all in plus some electrical upgrades as need. NAS storage is a must and streaming media and surveillance are always just for fun but will be built on.
Future plans for me in addition to what was mentioned should include more Linux admin as well as some Compaq/HP server certs and clearly some network security.