Information Technology is a great industry to work in. I love how versatile it is and how there is something for everyone in this field. Being that the industry is super broad and growing on a daily basis, it can become daunting when it comes time to choose what you want to do. Finding what you want to do is great and all, but finding something your PASSIONATE about is a completely different game, in my opinion. This post is a bit different, it’s based on a topic I feel many of us think about often, but never get a direct answer to. The topic for today is passion. What is it? Where can I find it? Is it even real? The reason I say that is because to this day, at 29 years old, great career in IT so far, I know I haven’t found that thing I’m TRULY passionate about but I’ve met many who have in this field.

Amazing to think that it’s already been two years since we entered this global pandemic. I recall as if it was just yesterday, March 9, 2020, here I was, a fresh CCNA walking into my first day at a new company and starting my journey as a Network Engineer. I was ecstatic, I felt this was a huge step forward in my career and I had become part of a team of rockstar engineers. My desire to learn everything I possibly could, combined with the Engineers’ desire to teach, was a lethal combination and I knew I would explode it to the max because I wanted to be a rockstar too. This feeling of certainty and fulfillment was short lived because Friday that week, March 13, 2020, the world as we knew it would change forever and my fate as an Engineer for this company was in the air.

Hey everyone! Today I wanted to show you an ongoing project I’ve been working on at home. Behold my Ubiquiti home network! This is my first ever, home network setup aside from plugging in a Comcast modem in the past. For a while I had been meaning to do something like this in my home but all I had was a bunch of older and loud, enterprise level Cisco equipment I used for my CCNA studies. I tried using the cisco gear, but the humming from the switches in my ear all day in my office was starting to drive me crazy! I heard the Ubiquiti name being thrown out there a lot, especially for homes and small businesses so I decided to give it a try.

My home network consists of a Unified Security Gateway (USG-3P), one US-8 150W switch with 8 PoE capable ports, and two Unified AC PRO access points, one on each end of my home. Aside from the Ubiquiti equipment, I have a four bay Synology DS920+ Network Attached Storage (NAS) and a CyberPower Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS). The USG on the upper left-hand corner of the image below, is a router/firewall and is what directly connects to my cable modem via the yellow ethernet cable. From there, the blue ethernet cable going from the USG to port 1 on the switch on the right, is what allows any device plugged into the switch, access to the network/internet.

Hello world!

Today I bring you a short read, regarding a project I worked on over the weekend for one of my father in-law’s clients. My father in-law owns his own business, does a lot of ethernet cable runs, installs security cameras, amongst many other things, for small and large businesses. I had an opportunity to join him over the weekend for part two of a cable management job he was working on. The previous weekend, he had done cable management on one of two racks at this business. As expected, the second rack was a mess, you literally couldn’t see the equipment these cables were going to. The fact that the majority of businesses IDF’s look just like this or worse is crazy!

Crazy times we’re currently living in huh? For some, what once was merely a dream, working from home, has become a reality. Maybe not the way they envisioned it happening but hey, it happened! Fortunately, technology nowadays gives us unimaginable bandwidth and allows us to adapt seamlessly in times like this, without skipping a beat.

Welcome back! Today we will learn how to Whitelist/Blacklist IP addresses and URL’s on your Cisco FMC. Lets get logged into our FMC and get to work!

Step one, is to click on the “Analysis” tab à Connections/Events.

Today we will be going over a quick and easy to use tool created by Cisco, for you’re Webex Teams environment. The tool is actually a bot called “CiscoEoL”, or End of Life. One of my colleagues recently introduced me to it and I haven’t put it down since. The bot isn’t much of a WOW factor in the sense of features, but the information it provides is awesome for Engineers who spend time being proactive and monitoring their client’s devices.

Data backup is a must in any organization big or small. Having backups in multiple remote locations means peace of mind to an admin, because he or she can rest assured their data is stored in a safe place should something catastrophic happen. Today we will be looking at how to configure remote backups for FMC, assuming you already have your remote storage location setup. Cisco best practice is to remotely backup your FMC by mounting an “SSH, SMB, or SSHFS network volume”. Although your backups will be going remote, you are still able to manage them locally through FMC. Please do keep in mind that this article pertains to a SINGLE FMC and not HA peers, as the process is a bit different. That said, lets log in to our FMC and get to work!

Hello world! Today I bring you a short, but informative nugget on how to successfully implement SNMP on your Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC). SNMP, at a very high level, is a UDP based protocol, using port 161, that is used to monitor communication between Network devices. This protocol is extremely helpful for Network Admins, as it not only gives you visibility of the traffic going between two devices, but it also provides you with flexibility as to WHAT kind of traffic you want visibility of. Let’s take a look at how simple it is to implement this protocol on FMC running version 6.7.