So during the programme, one of the stretch goals was to read a TCPdump file in Wireshark. But knowing it's going to be an essential tool for troubleshooting in the future I thought I'd start Chris Greer's Wireshark Masterclass YT playlist. Most important is he takes the time into how to capture packets using just the CLI, a good sign indeed.  I have to say, during my first capture, I was blown away by the amount of information. I saw my wifi-extender sending out broadcast packets, I saw Youtube and even Blogger packets on the way! It was pretty impressive. I had, with no basis at all, always expected things to be far more static. For practice and just to cement my learning, I have also installed Centos 9 on a VM and just issued a tcpdump command just to see how I'll be exploring networking issues in AWS after all. Even from the screenshot I could notice that the network traffic goes through the virtualised hardware and even shows my ISP! Chris introduced the concept ...

  For our very last lab about the network, we were given the following customer environment to build. By virtue of the fact the AWS management console GUI is constantly updated it meant that our task instructions were wholly out of date. However, this actually proved to only make it a far more involved and fun process - necessitating lots of troubleshooting when things had not spun up as expected. I felt like I had learnt a lot more this way and for the benefit of my future self, I thought I would make some step by step notes (not necessarily in reference to the diagram above) to serve as prompts for any future cloud VPC's I'll be spinning up. Our challenge was to build the VPC as the diagram above.  Create an elastic IP. We will associate this later with our NAT gateway. Launch your VPC with a private class IP range without forgetting to specific how many availability zones (AZ) you want. Create and label your subnets, again specifying what AZ, as none are public at the ...

Computer networking is all around us. From the days of dial up internet, internet connected devices have grown rapidly on the global scale. Despite this, across the globe there are broadly three types of computer network  - LAN/MAN and WAN.  The above diagram does a good example of representing the geographical elements of these networks. But it is worth elaborating bit further. LAN networks are usually used in office locations and connected by physical cables and local wifi. MAN networks are typically interconnected LAN networks with a private network link and a connection to the internet. MAN use cases are mostly reserved for governmental or state institutions, along with huge corporates - I'd imagine Alphabet Inc in Silicon Valley might use this for example. Whilst WAN connects devices in a large geographic area, across multiple cities or countries. WAN's are used to connect LANs. You could argue that the biggest WAN in the world is the internet itself. Some of the fundamen...

Operating a computer with BASH is the reality the end-user faced prior to Window's graphical user interface. In the end however, what we're actually doing is rather much the same. By deploying actions via a CLI, we're empowered in our agency in what we can schedule and automate in the environment.  Ensuring we're starting off at the right directory is key, for that we use; pwd This outputs are current directory which informs us were we're currently sitting at in the system. A basic rule of command syntax is that is delivered in below format; command -> option - > argument eg. sudo usermod -a -G Sales arosalez sudo usermod -> -a -G  -> Sales arosalez The most basic commands revolve around providing quick user or system data. I won't elaborate on the most of these as they are either ubiquitous or pretty self evident. ls, cd, whoami, id, hostname, uptime, date cal, clear, echo, history, touch, cat Don't forget to use the tab autocomplete function...

  Today we had a recent AWS re/Start Graduate join us for a short presentation and Q&A about their experience both about the programme and their post-programme period before starting a role as a Cloud Engineer.  It was great to hear from someone who less then 12 months ago had also undergone the same exact programme we're a third of the way through now. We got an insight into their day to day (lots of meetings!), how long it took until they were allowed to pick up tickets independently (two months) and how much did their employer support their development (lots!). By chance, they were scheduled to complete the solutions AWS solutions architect certification tomorrow! I found it incredibly motivating and centring to hear their story. I made sure to ask a question myself, which revolved around finding potential roles and then knowing the essential skills that we might need to enhance our employability. The advice provided was; Make sure to continue studying Networking. This ...