Seven years ago ...

Seven years ago I was in my chair like today I do. Thinking about what I could write in my recently opened blog. I wanted to write something about networking and security but I didn’t know exactly what to write. The goal were writing because I wanted to improve the writing skill which was needed to pass the English exams at Official School of Languages. In the beginning, I wrote in Spanish because writing was a hard-working task for me. However, I ended up writing in English because it’s better for improving the writing skill in English language.

Writing is not the only skill I wanted to improve but also the reading skill to get new vocabulary. Therefore, I try to get time for reading books. For instance, I’ve been reading many books in the last year such as Factfulness, The Art of Intrusion or Inside Soviet Military Intelligence although I’ve also read the Cyber Strategy of the U.S. of America and Aprendiendo de los mejores. Actually, I love reading and I’ve even been reading the Revue Stratégique Cyberdéfense de France.

Writing and reading are important skills to improve languages but speaking is also very important. I don't speak a lot in English language in my job, just from time to time, but I’ve had the lucky to provide Training on Networks, Systems, Hacking and Forensics in the last year where I’ve able to improve the speaking skill in my native language. I think students have learnt many interesting things such as Buffer Overflow Attacks or Fileless malware forensics. In addition, I’ve been in a high school to make an speech Security on the Internet for teenagers.

I think the training courses were interesting because we’ve deployed, installed and configured many tools. For instance, we configured L7 DDoS Mitigation, CSRF Protection, XXE Protection and Bot Protection with F5 BIG-IP ASM. In addition, I’ve tested with SSO Authentication, Portal Access & Webtops, and SSO for Terminal Services with F5 BIG-IP APM. The new version 14.0 in BIG-IP added lots of features and improvements such as the new HTML5 Dashboard or the Threat Campaigns Subscription.

During the last year, the new version 6.2 in FortiOS has also been released. It’s amazing the amount of new security features that have been improved. Security Fabric, SD-WAN, Inspection modes, WIFI6 are only some features improved. In addition, I’ve installed security appliances such as FortiSwitch, FortiSandbox and FortiWeb as well as I’ve configured two FortiGates in a VRRP domain.

This last year has been rewarding because I’ve also been working with networks. I’ve studied about Cisco Nexus such as vPC, FabricPath, Fabric EXtender (FEX), etc. I’ve installed Mellanox switches where I studied about RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and Data Center Bridging (DCB). What’s more, I’ve been reading and studying about Outdoor Wireless Link to know the Fresnel zone, channel width, signal-to-noise radio (SNR), EIRP, etc.

Regards my friends. I'm delighted. It's time to rest. It's time for a holiday.