I'm Free!
I have to admit, being a server administrator is hard...
I'm first and foremost a network engineer. My interest has long been in understanding how the Internet works. I was really interested in service provider technology, but I ended up working mostly for big corporations.
I worked and studied hard during my 20's. I got my CCNP = Cisco Certified Network Professional in 2010, but i didn't get to work with networking until 3 years later. In 2013 I got to work for a consultant company in Norway and finally, I got the chance to work with what I was trained to do.
I worked and studied hard on my spare-time. Between 2013 and 2016 I took various other Cisco certificates. By the time of 2017 I started to go for the CCIE R&S (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert in Routing and Switching). It is one of the most prestigious titles you can achieve in the business.
I was never into the security aspects of computer communication. I was more interested in how Computer A could reach computer B in another country. I had a friend/colleague who was specialized in network security though. He was concerned about Googles increasing surveillance. This was around 2018 i think. He seemed a bit paranoid i thought at the time (he probably had good reasons for it). It comes with the work i guess. I shrugged my shoulders. His solution though, to get an iPhone instead, I still don't agree with. Apple seems just as bad, if not worse, than Google. Unfortunately we don't talk anymore since 2021. I hope he is alright.
At the start of 2020, when the corona virus fear mongering started, I was skeptical, but I had no knowledge about viruses at the time so I just played along when the Lockdown came. For me it was just an added benefit of not having to travel to work everyday. If I was a restaurant owner, I would probably have woken up sooner. I was never a big consumer of mainstream media, and I still remembered the outcome of the swineflu epidemic in 2009-2010. I thought "how can we know beforehand that it is going to be so bad?" I remember back then that the chance of dying of the disease was calculated to be maybe around 2%, but the experts admitted that we didn't have enough data yet. And it made sense because only those who were already so sick that they were at the hospital was being tested, so obviously the death rate among those would be higher than in the general population. Anyway, when the summer in Norway came, I thought it was going back to normal soon.
When the 2nd wave of fear mongering came in the Autumn of 2020, I started to wonder how bad this disease really is. I discussed this with my security friend, but his arguments seemed not to make sense to me. I guess his nature of being paranoid applied to everything in his life, not just IT security. By this time:
Authorities started to test 10 times more people than what you did the first wave, so not surprisingly the amount of positive test results increased tenfold. Most people seemed to not notice that detail.
The media was writing that the hospitals were full, which has been a headline for at least the past 10 years. I read some statistics that Sweden have one of the lowest hospital beds per capita in whole Europe. No wonder the hospitals are full.
The death rate in the statistics sank drastically during the excessive testing. But nobody mentioned that in the media.
By the end of 2020 I was about to prepare for the CCIE lab exam in Brussels. But due to geopolitical events like the US president election being stolen, and the coronavirus being all a scam, I could not focus anymore on that. There were simply more important things in life at the time.
In the beginning of 2021 I had fully realized what a scam the corona virus was. I have learnt so much that I realize now that I almost don't know anything at all. I'm not even sure that so called viruses (which is the latin word for poison) exists, or cause diseases. There were plenty of events in 2021 and 2022, but I'll save it for another day. This was supposed to be about migrating away from Windows, going over to Linux and become free. I'm almost at that point now.
... Let's just say that 2021 was the year when i finally escaped the matrix and I'm no longer as naive as I was pre-2018. I started to worry about my privacy. Eventually I discovered a Youtube channel called Rob Braxman Tech. His videos about Big Tech surveillance was really eye opening. I started to study his material and I decided that I wan't to get rid of Google and Microsoft from my home (I never had any Apple products).
The problem was that my home network is not like any ordinary home network. I had installed Microsoft Certificate Authority, Active Directory and DNS. I had to replace all those services before I could switch to Linux. I had an event recently when my Nextcloud server broke beyond repair, again. (In hindsight I should have taken a backup before i deleted that file). That is my point of being a server administrator is hard. My data is safe, but I have to set up everything from scratch.
The good thing about this; Nextcloud was the only server that had an AD integration, that meant I had no reason to have the Microsoft server anymore! I scrapped it and reinstalled my computer with Kubuntu OS. Now I can sleep comfortably knowing that I'm no longer subject to Microsoft's telemetry gathering.
Now I have the chance to start all over again. The first thing I'm going to do is to install FreeIPA, so I can get identity management, certificate authority and DNS back. But this time all open source. This is my new favorite hobby, and perhaps my new job in the future. I would love to work with small businesses that wants a complete open-source infrastructure.