My First Attempt At Setting Up A Windows Server 2016 lab
So over the past few weeks I've been thinking about my career and the direction I'd like to take it. A combination of things came into play, including not being bored, money, work/life balance, etc. Ultimately, I decided continuing on the path towards being a full blown sys admin was the way to go.
There are a lot of things I don't have a solid handle on yet. I realized this when I was spinning up a Windows Server 2016 VM last weekend. The install went fine, and i even threw Active Directory on there w/ the DNS. The wizard is pretty awesome at letting you roll through pretty smoothly. What i realized after I had the domain set up was that I didn't have much understanding of DNS at all anymore.
I say anymore, because believe it or not, there was a time I was completely focused on networking. This was years ago and I thought that was where I wanted my career to go. Then i had got into programming, got a wife, kids, etc. Pretty much, life happened and my learning sortof got away from me.
Fast forward to now, here I am looking at the network adapter, in the ipv4 properties wondering to myself what the heck am i doing???
I realize I have to brush up on my network skills. So now I'm going all the way back to the basics and reading a book called Windows Networking Essentials. Its actually a book that covers the topics for the MTA for networking. Now i'm not going for that cert (got my eye on the MCSA Server 2016, hence the lab setup), but i'm not even halfway through and things are starting to come back to me.
One thing is for sure, I won't let my knowledge lapse like this again. My problem has always been that if i'm not working with something on a particular job, I just stop fooling around with it altogether. I'm going to make it a point to just continuously lab to push my skills forward, whether i get to use a tool in a production setting or not.
Because having to refresh old skills kind of sucks!