Getting serious about skills development

So I as I recently mentioned in another post, I have temporarily suspended my endless pursuit of creating a startup. I decided that in this down economy, my time is better invested in expanding my systems engineering skill set.

Here are the things I'm planning to do (in order). Expect detailed blog posts on each item over the next couple months.

1) Setup a VPN linking the resources of Known Element employees and partners.

This spans our physical presences in El Segundo, Anaheim, El Monte and various other places both inside and outside of Southern California. The public entry point is running on a VZ slice in the Uk, with native v6 connectivity! The lab and El Segundo facilities are linked already, with other sites being brought online regularly. It's never really "done" as new nodes will be added on a regular basis. However the infrastructure and methodology are complete.

2) Upgrade media server to latest Ubuntu version, hook up to wired network and setup streaming media.

Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04. Works like a charm. Going to leave it on the LTS version. Will work on boxee and other media things later on. Deployed a front end on the vm server so TV can be watched in the office. Didn't hook up the backend to the wired network, works great over wireless.


3) Setup an Active Directory environment consisting of multiple forests (socalwifi.net and knownelement.com), domains (corporate, partner, development) and organizational units (linux boxes, cisco gear, production, ) and groups (production,development,.

Active Directory/DNS/DHCP deployed in production. Will add groups/domains/forests etc as time goes on.

4) Setup Excahnge 2007 complete with Unifed Messaging (integrated to Freeswitch of course) and with sync4j

5) Ensure all physical and virtual machines are backed up (locally and to s3), monitored and directly accessible, both over the local network and the VPN.

This is underway and should be complete by the end of March.

6) Setup all the Cisco gear to authenticate via TACACS+/Kerberos to the AD infrastructure.

7) Setup WPA2 Enterprise with Radius and one time passwords.

That should be enough to keep me busy for a month or so. Then I'll start blogging on how we are building a service prodiver lab. Stay tuned. Q2 is gonna be a lot of fun!