First Posted 8/19/2021
I’m super happy to report that I’ll be taking quite the detour from my regular reading list to focus on these awesome Baby University titles with my brand new daughter who was born this past weekend!
As much as I love tinkering in the homelab & writing about it here, I’m going to take a long hiatus from that sort of thing so I can focus on our first kid. Both Mom and Baby are recovering well and super happy, but I need to be doing more so that Mrs. KD9CPB can get get the sleep she deserves instead of homelabbing. I do plan on adding more homelab content again someday, but I’m honestly not sure if that’ll be happening in a few months or in a few years. If you’re curious about what I’ll be up to in the meantime, here’s some details you might find interesting:
Thing #1: Being a good dad & husband is priority #1
This goes without saying, but the lion’s share of my spare cycles these days will be allocated to awesome stuff with the kid & the wife. I’m super excited to spend more time with my growing family, and as much as I’m a fan of the #labeveryday hashtag + lifestyle , I think Zig Zsiga says it best: What truly matters is family + self care, even for network engineers!
Thing #2: I should probably spend some time renewing my CCNP
As of this writing, I have a little over a year before my CCNP expires in Oct 2022. I really need to finish the SISE book, pass that test, and get enough continuing education points so that I don’t have to deal with taking the CCNP ENCOR monstrosity exam 🙂
I feel like there’s already tons of great CCNP cert preparation content out there, so I’m not going to spend any cycles writing about that here. Someday I want to either teach Cisco certification classes at a college or create certification prep content, but that day is not coming anytime soon. So I’ll be doing whatever it is I do to renew CCNP solo this time around.
Thing #3: I want to get back to my ham radio roots
One of my not-so-secret agendas of creating kd9cpb.com was to get newer ham radio folks interested in network engineering careers, while getting more seasoned network engineering folks into ham radio. Much to my surprise, the ham radio content on this silly website is more popular than I ever would have expected. So whenever I do find some spare cycles to write new kd9cpb.com stuff, it’s going to be on ham radio topics for the foreseeable future.
There’s going to be some pretty neat ham radio posts involving some network engineering favorites like Zerotier and Wireshark coming soon, so stay tuned! I’ve mostly been doing digital ham radio modes (DMR and FT8) so far in 2021, but I’ve been wanting to get back to my roots of hanging out on Chicago area UHF/VHF analog FM repeaters. So if you’re in the Chicagoland area, I hope to hear you on CFMC or W9ANL soon.
Thing #4: The kid’s privacy is paramount
As tempting as it is to share ultra-cute pictures & videos of me doing extremely nerdy things with the kid, this will likely be the first & last time you hear much about her publicly online. I want to respect her right to as small of a digital footprint as she wants. I’m a big believer that whatever you put on the internet will stay up there forever & be used against you whenever the opportunity presents itself, so there won’t be many Costello kid details at all on the public interwebs for a very long time.
If she wants to post a boatload of her personal info on a public website or on the ham radio airwaves someday, that’s fine. But if she grows up to be a privacy-loving infosec expert, I don’t want her to be stuck with a massive digital footprint cause of her dad’s silly internet writings. Maybe that’s being over-paranoid, but since I can’t predict how the privacy landscape will be once she’s old enough to go online, I can’t feel good about putting any of her personally identifiable information out in the open.
What’s coming after the hiatus?
I have some pretty awesome homelab ideas listed below that I’m looking forward to doing once the hiatus ends. If you or someone you know does anything similar to the following ideas, let me know and I’ll link to your content here!
- An ExaBGP homelab similar to Jason Murray’s, but in a cloud eve-ng setup with a bunch of OSPF stuff too
- Zero Touch Provisioning ArubaOS-CX from a Raspberry Pi running DHCP/TFTP servers and Python scripts. Might do this for ArubaOS-Switch or other switch vendor OSes too
- Much more perfSONAR fun with Raspberry Pis and cloud eve-ng
- Cisco ISE 3 DUO integration to get 2FA TACACS working at home
- JunOS Telemetry Interface data displayed real-time on a Tidbyt display
- Other wacky Cisco ISE 3 shenanigans
Big thanks to everyone that’s retweeted, shared or commented on any of the kd9cpb.com posts over the past year. I can’t believe this silly way for me to prevent pandemic boredom has turned into a website with thousands of viewers. There’s no good way for me to close out this post, so I’ll let this fantastic Arnold meme express my thoughts on what the future of this category looks like:
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