#You will never know ...

##If you never try.

Things have been somewhat busy, somewhat stressful, but just enough to be motivating. I have continued with the whole Job Interview sequence, and reached the point that I feared the most, to be honest. Today is perhaps the biggest job interview of my entire life. To say that I am not nervous would be dishonest, and that is something I am not. Sure, I have worked in tech before, many moons ago. Shockingly I can still figure things out on my own without someone holding my hand. I am not talking about figuring out a simple math problem, I am talking about setting up complex systems. While I may not know the outcome today, I will know the feeling that I derive from the encounter..

I figured that I may as well plug this update in while drinking my morning coffee. Better to get it done before I bury myself in preparing to do the presentation that I have to do this afternoon. You guessed it, my stomach is doing gymnastics on an entirely different plain of existence this morning. All the self doubt is kicking in, the self negativity that always attempts to cloud productivity and progress. But, through the years I have learned one thing, if nothing else... Nobody, but absolutely nobody can be harder on you than you yourself.

My mind has been clouded. all of the internal anxiety gnawing away at self confidence, testing the very stamina that I profess to possess. Yet, I push it to the back of my mind and just keep pushing to accomplish the things that I set out to accomplish. Appointments, commitments, entertainment, and minor preparations for rapid change in the event that today's outcome goes the way that I hope that it does. In the event that it does, the entire style of this website and my writing will likely change to a more serious and more professional tone. But even when my mind makes things chaos, there is a calm that settles in and shows me how to push through..

Through that chaos, I did what I needed to do for the Interview aspect, but in addition to that, I was able to make some good progress on my network project. Active Directory in Place, Serving DNS from this server to the gateway, and as such the rest of the project. Set up IPBan to serve as a local point of defense for the Windows Server, in the event that one of my other machines end up being compromised on the Tailscale side of things. Because Tailscale provides a direct access pathway, I had to implement some additional means of trying to protect it. The Linux servers are both also configured with fail2ban now as well, for the same reason.

In the event of compromise, brute force type traffic will theoretically be dropped at the local firewall. Then there were several communication issues between hosts with the containerized grafana implementation. Largely names and slight configuration errors, except for the Mac integration. That in and of itself was a whole different creature to deal with on both sides. FleetDM provided similar issues with naming, but also ensuring correct pathways were established. While I truly am enjoying this, and I do understand that each software package largely serves a different purpose, I am mostly looking forward to bringing my phone into this whole mix of devices. I am also excited to begin playing with MDM technology.

I have a lot to learn here though and this will be somewhat of a struggle because many parts are included only in the professional version of the software. Another Obstacle that I have to contend with is that I had to opt to run FleetDM because I am hosting this on a 23 year old machine that does not provide the resources required for a complete Fleet set up. So it work around after work around, but there is still much progress already behind me, and I look forward to the challenges that remain before me. If you can not answer someone honestly by saying "I don't know yet, but I guess we are about to find out" what are you really learning along the way?

The benefit to this is that I am gaining the knowledge and experience along the way, but the reality of it is when I get it finally all worked out to where I think it should be, I can then turn around and try to hack it, for the real world system that it is instead of a pre-configured VM with a known outcome. Don't get me wrong. Those VM's have a purpose and they serve it very well. But I am trying to set this up so that it will basically attempt to be self defending to what ever extent I can manage to figure that out. I am not posting this to brag by any means. There is nothing to brag about. I am posting this because who in their right mind uses old hardware to try to build something modern, and of all places, at home.

If you actually took the time to read this, Thank You.

Have a fantastic day!