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I’ve noticed that everything seems to come in waves with this job, and I wonder if this is typical of the field or just this position.

Sometimes I am bored out of my mind and doing everything I can to fill the time …. cleaning / organizing / reading and researching / anything besides just calling it quits and going home early…and then there are times when I work non-stop from 7:30a-3:30p, 4, or even close to 5:00pm. No lunch, no breaks … just straight through.

Luckily, right now I’m busy in a good way!

After getting a Linux VM to develop a network monitoring system, I’ve been having a great time getting to really know Linux and unlock a whole new world of tools that it comes with!

I have always been a Mac user in my personal life, with a ‘practice’ Windows laptop with Linux VMs….but man, working on a Linux system for work has really gotten me into the terminal and seeing just how customizable and flexible Linux is compared to the bloat and rigidity of Windows.

As an IT professional and someone trying to really understand how these machines and systems are built, the Linux terminal experience has been invaluable. Being able to see how the system is organized and how easy (OR DIFFICULT) it can be to make certain adjustments and seeing how basically EVERYTHING is customizable with enough willpower….wow, that’s really something!

vs…Windows….

Also…Microsoft’s incompetence as of late has been a real boon to Linux as a whole. Microsoft ironically has been doing great promo for the penguin these days!

Between

• Broken updates that nearly brick their computers
• Revealing that up to 30% of MS code is AI generated
• Pushing features to users that were not asked for
• Collecting user data on an insane scale
• Killing Windows 10 in favor of the AI slopfest of Win 11

it was definitely time to switch over anyway. MS is really driving itself into the ground, and they don’t seem to really care…

Onto Linux we go!! I’ve been loving Tech Twitter these days…we’ve been having a great time seeing Microsoft screwing everything up.

Professionally, it’s been quite the adjustment to shift over into ‘developer mode’ while creating solutions.

Besides building the network monitoring system, I also need to create a system / workflow of some kind to aggregate the data and create monthly uptime / cpu / ram / etc reports so that we can compare the data over time. Seems like a pretty basic ask for a network monitoring system, right? Well…trade-offs. Of the systems I evaluated, the one I went with was the most powerful and easiest to set up / customize, but was missing that ONE thing.

Oh, well — off to developing! Since trying to think on how to implement this, I’ve gotten to take a look at and get some experience with:

• APIs
• Ansible
• HeidiSQL
• RRDTool
• Python

While I have figured out how the data will flow, what needs to be done, and what it SHOULD look like in the end….now we have to actually build the thing.

It shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but it still does…just when you think you know a lot about tech, you encounter a new roadblock and think “HOLY CRAP, there’s a whole world of stuff that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know about.” You don’t even know how much you don’t know, and that’s super humbling.

Well…off we go!