Diary of a Network Geek

I can’t remember what the first thing is!

For the past week or so, I’ve come up with several ideas for blog entries and forgotten them before I could get to a web interface and make the actual entry! Just now I sat down to write an entry that I’d thought of yesterday and drew a complete blank. How terrible! I’m sure that it would have been enlightening and horribly important, too. No doubt it would have made comment on current events and Linux and Microsoft vs. Novell. Or, maybe it would have mentioned certification and Cisco. Or, possibly even debated the merits of the CNE vs. the MCSE vs. the CCNA.
Or, it could have been total dribble about how pretty my ponds are.
Who knows? Damn early senility. See what working in the IT industry does to you?!?

Well, 10 minutes per chapter, anyway.

I just finished Teach Yourself Linux in 10 Minutes last night and was fairly impressed. Of course, it was a review of Linux for me, not a true knowlege dump, but it was a good refresher. And, it gave me some new information that I hadn’t had before. I tend to learn things on the go, as I’m trying to accomplish a goal of some kind, so sometimes, I miss things. This was certainly the case with Linux. So, since I’d gotten this book some time ago and never read it, I decided it was time to fill in some gaps.
This is pretty basic stuff, but it’s a good introduction to Linux for someone that has never really used it before. It talks the reader through the basics, starting with logging in and going all the way through printing and basic shell-scripting. It’s fairly comprehensive, for an introductory book, and each chapter is broken down into managable chunks. And, yes, each chapter takes about 10 minutes to read.

All in all a good book and worth the money.

Well, not much of an update today, but I thought I’d add in some personal stuff. Just for variety.
Last weekend, the girls went out to a Celtic Fest and left me at home. I thought it would be nice for them to get some “girl time” together. Anne has been working really hard and hasn’t been able to see Allie as much as she’d like, so I thought it would be a good opportunity for them to “bond”. This weekend Anne isn’t feeling too well, so I might just end up taking Allie out shopping for a little while. We need to get a book on telling time for her. I’ve instituted a work-for-allowance program that requires some knowledge of telling time. (Okay, so what I’ve done is tell her that I’ll pay her $2.50 per hour of cleaning up and other chores that she does. She might as well get used to the idea young. It is how the world works, after all.) Besides, I also need to get a book on the current version of Red Hat Linux. After looking around the Internet at stuff, it seems like everything for Linux of any real value assumes that you have a version of Red Hat installed. So, in spite of the fact that I’ve been enjoying Storm Linux, I’ll be learning Red Hat.
Speaking of learning… One of the reasons that I’m focusing more on Linux is that my studying for my CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate, for the uninitiated) has been slow going indeed. I’m still working on it, but with the lack of sleep that house guests create, it’s been hard to slog through the issues relating to sub-networking. It’s especially bad since I’m already familiar with most of the material! I just have to get the Cisco methods down for the test. Shoot! I’ve been doing TCP/IP since Novell used IP tunneling!! (That’s over 8 years, incidentally.)
Anyway, this is going to be a light weekend. At least, it is if I have anything to say about it. I’m in a good mood since I got two calls from headhunters on Friday. They’re looking to fill Network Manager positions, which is what I think I need to have next. I changed my resume on Monster.Com to reflect the fact that I managed people for the past two years. It seems to have made a difference! So, like I said, I’m in a pretty good mood this morning, so, if Anne is feeling up to it, I may just take my two girls out to our favorite little Greek place for lunch, Niko Niko’s.

See you next week!

Well, now that I’ve finally set up my news and updates page, namely Diary of a Network Geek, I’m going to start adding to it. My dear, sweet girlfriend, Anne, suggested that I chronicle my quest for a new job. I’ve decided that I like that suggestion, so I’m going to start with a little background.
The company I started working for when I moved to Texas, Harbor Financial Mortgage Corporation, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December of 1999. Currently, I’m a contractor for the liquidation company that is disposing of Harbor’s assets. Without going into too much detail about why they filed Chapter 11, let’s just say it was a bit of a surprise. When I joined the company in June of 1998, we were in a period of explosive growth. We gained over 200 employees in less than 8 months, and continued to add employees slowly for a year. Less than two years after I signed on, we’re all but gone. At last count, there were about a dozen employees left here, including myself.
So, you ask, what have I been doing since December? Well, for starters, I separated the Dallas network from the combined Houston-Waco networks. I was in charge of the Houston-Waco end of things. It all happened just like it’s supposed to in the on-line documentation at Novell. Well, after the router guys at Sprint got the right routers disconnected, that is. *Sigh* Nothing’s perfect, I suppose. On the upside, the Houston separation from Waco went without even that much going wrong. Not every day that a Network Engineer gets to purposely break then fix a network!
After that, mostly what I did was maintain the system as it’s been. I kept the backups running and made sure that the sad, little ISDN connection to the Internet was up and running. Of course, from time to time I had to perform some other regular maintenance, but that didn’t take much time. So, in between times, I studied for my CNE (Certified Netware Engineer, for the uninitiated) update test. Which I passed, BTW. So now I’m a genuine CNE 5. In fact, the last time I called Novell, I was the only Jim Hoffman that was a CNE! Cool!
And, the rest of the time, I spend catching up on all the tech reading that I’ve been missing out on. I setup a Linux machine, too, just to brush up my Unix skills, which are far too out of date for my taste. Oh, yeah, I’ve been talking to people about jobs, too. See, I’ll be totally out of work at the end of June. At least, that’s what they’re saying today. Who knows, though, next week they might tell me to get out. Or they might tell me that they’re extending the contract until the end of July! I just don’t know what’s going to happen from day to day.
So, this Diary of a Network Geek will chronicle my trials and tribulations as I go out job hunting. I promise to change the names of the people involved to “protect the innocent”!