Last nightwatch, monitoring network connections...

Yes, tonight is my last shift at a Network Operations Central (NOC). Tuesday I start working for a local webdesign/websolution company. No more working weekends, no more evenings and nights.

It was bound to happen sooner or later...me joining the masses of "nine-to-five".

At least I'm going to work with people more down to earth, since it isn't a big corporation. It's owned and run by 2 people. One of which lives in the same area I live in. Some would maybe say it could have it's disadvantages, but I see it differently:

• I don't have a driver's license, and the public transport available where I live isn't excactly tip-top, so at least I don't have to worry about getting to work.
• With just 2 people to answer to, I don't have to argue against a large hierarchy to express my opinions about work-related issues.
  

And for once in my life, I'll be working with things I've been playing with in my own time as a hobby. So I have quite broad experience with it. General webdesign with graphics and cascading style sheets are the subjects I enjoyed best @ school when I studied for a bachelor's degree in IT.

Working with Service Level Agreements in accordance with connection tracking, monitoring and faulthandling at an ISP, wasn't quite as I imagined it would be. At least not at a business level, in which I worked from august'07 up until now. It got to beaurocratic for my taste. Not that I don't value the experience I've had at my current job.

I've learned a lot about network topology (something I had trouble understanding when in school), routing theoretics and Internet backbones. And through a lot of websurfing and manual reading, I've also learned a shit load about network security; on the hardware layer, IP layer and on the software layer. And as a result, I've hardened security in both the LANs and WLANs @ my mom's and dad's places, and also my DMZ (publicly available domain, read: my bedroom ;P).

My experience gained working @ a NOC also gave me the idea of tunneling IP connections between two locations under the same WAN (ISP backbone), allowing me to serve my linux-machines located @ my mom's house (the DMZ), to a router I set up on my dad's Internet access that sports a public Internet IP address (with a DNS record) using Linux IP/port forwarding (Linux IP Masquerade, the Linux version of NAT) and OpenSSL/OpenSSH.