Projects

What I'm Building

Most of what I know I learned by breaking things on purpose. Here's what I'm working on in my home lab, the scripts I use to take the grind out of IT work, and the kind of projects I handle on the job.

Home Lab: Networking, Switching & Routing

My home lab is where I practice what I don't get to touch every day at work. On the networking side, I build out switched and routed networks from scratch, then break them and figure out why traffic stopped. It's the fastest way I've found to make troubleshooting a habit instead of a guess.

  • Switching
  • Routing
  • Network troubleshooting

Home Lab: Windows Server & Active Directory

I run my own Windows Server domain so I can try changes safely before I'd ever make them on a production network: building out Active Directory, managing users and groups, and seeing how settings actually land on the machines that join the domain.

  • Windows Server
  • Active Directory
  • Server management

Home Lab: Splunk & ACAS

Two sides of the same question: what's happening on my network, and what's vulnerable on it? Splunk pulls the logs together so I can search and spot patterns, and ACAS scans the lab so I can find the vulnerabilities, fix them, and scan again to prove they're gone.

  • Splunk
  • ACAS
  • Log analysis
  • Vulnerability scanning

Scripting & Automation

If I have to do something more than a few times, I try to script it. I've written Python and Bash scripts that handle account setup, push out and patch engineering software, clean up machines, run imaging tasks, install device drivers, and repair broken Software Center clients. Each one turns a repetitive, error-prone job into something consistent and fast.

  • Python
  • Bash
  • Account setup
  • Software installs & patching
  • Imaging
  • Drivers
  • Software Center fixes

On the Job: Keeping DoW Endpoints Secure

At work, much of what I do is behind-the-scenes security: reimaging machines to hardened DoW baselines, keeping endpoints in compliance, and making sure only the right devices and people get onto the network. The details stay at work, but the habits of documenting, verifying, and doing it the same way every time come home to the lab.

  • Hardened imaging
  • Endpoint compliance
  • Network access control