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BSD - PfSense - Dream job
jaffe
Member Posts: 11 ■□□□□□□□□□
Hello all,
I'm currently in an overpaid "alert monkey" position in my current job (NOC Specialist II) and am very much missing my old job. My current job revolves around heavy monitoring of applications (<5% troubleshooting) and escalation to the engineers that can actually solve the problem (we don't get the chance to).
In the NOC at my old job (where I was heavily underpaid, hence why I left), a team of 3 (including myself) administered and co-configured over 150 customer ethernet networks (apartment complexes) running off Dell / Cisco layer 2 and multilayer switches with ruckus wireless all throughout each network. The cool thing about this was... we used servers running FreeBSD or PfSense for every network.
I seriously felt like an engineer inspecting tcpdumps all day, modifying firewall rules with ipfw (ipfirewall), changing vlan configurations on the switches and servers, writing and modifying DHCP configuration files, configuring virtual IPs and interfaces, configuring NAT and PAT, configuring CARP (the list goes on) and just plain solving network problems.
That's what I miss the most... solving problems. It's fun to fix an outage or fix someones wired or wireless internet connection based off troubleshooting and packet inspection. It's fun to modify and inspect network traffic via CLI. It's not fun to watch god damn high disk usage alerts for Windows Server VMs all day (current job). I excelled incredibly at my last job because of how much I enjoyed it. And now, I don't feel valuable any more (it's actually made me want to study more in free time).
Does anyone else have a job administering networks through BSD or any open source firewall? Does anyone here sit in a CLI all day doing routing / switching / wireless (fun stuff)?
If so, what are your recommendations on certs (currently have net+ and am attempting CCNA exam in January) and also job titles / companies I should be searching for?
Thanks!
I'm currently in an overpaid "alert monkey" position in my current job (NOC Specialist II) and am very much missing my old job. My current job revolves around heavy monitoring of applications (<5% troubleshooting) and escalation to the engineers that can actually solve the problem (we don't get the chance to).
In the NOC at my old job (where I was heavily underpaid, hence why I left), a team of 3 (including myself) administered and co-configured over 150 customer ethernet networks (apartment complexes) running off Dell / Cisco layer 2 and multilayer switches with ruckus wireless all throughout each network. The cool thing about this was... we used servers running FreeBSD or PfSense for every network.
I seriously felt like an engineer inspecting tcpdumps all day, modifying firewall rules with ipfw (ipfirewall), changing vlan configurations on the switches and servers, writing and modifying DHCP configuration files, configuring virtual IPs and interfaces, configuring NAT and PAT, configuring CARP (the list goes on) and just plain solving network problems.
That's what I miss the most... solving problems. It's fun to fix an outage or fix someones wired or wireless internet connection based off troubleshooting and packet inspection. It's fun to modify and inspect network traffic via CLI. It's not fun to watch god damn high disk usage alerts for Windows Server VMs all day (current job). I excelled incredibly at my last job because of how much I enjoyed it. And now, I don't feel valuable any more (it's actually made me want to study more in free time).
Does anyone else have a job administering networks through BSD or any open source firewall? Does anyone here sit in a CLI all day doing routing / switching / wireless (fun stuff)?
If so, what are your recommendations on certs (currently have net+ and am attempting CCNA exam in January) and also job titles / companies I should be searching for?
Thanks!