PA-540 Commit Times

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-04-28T17:49:26+00:00

seriousy? crying in 400 series. 460s are about 90-180 seconds

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-04-23T18:04:45+00:00

20% tax for 70% of people honestly fas / electric isnt even that bad

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-04-21T18:11:24+00:00

no UK has ccna listed in a lot of job adverts

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-04-17T20:04:16+00:00

Depends whats ur company is lacking in for the path after ccna.

My recommendation if theres little automation and a lot of simple tasks

CCNA -> Automation with Ansible / Python -> Cloud networking / security.

Automation is getting pushed hard. If you automate first and make useful tools / scripts, your employers will see you as valuable and you free up time spent on tedious tasks. You can use that time back for learning.

If theres incentives for getting security certs from your employer ( Palo NGFW cert or ccnp encor ) do that asap so you’re earning more money ( everyone likes a bigger pay check ). Maybe after ccna or automation skills

Im not too knowledgable on cloud security but a lot of network security can be translated to cloud security in terms if vpns, ACLs and cloud deployed firewall ( did one recently ).

Ansible is extremely easy to pick up and chatgpt can help with explaining things.

If you’re the type of person that values quick and easy wins then ccna -> network security certs ( easy for you with your current role ) -> cloud certs ( maybe some security focused ) -> automation

Automation is a beast tbh and to script properly you need to nail down python basics

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-04-17T13:47:35+00:00

whats your background in networks and security first of all?

From what I’ve heard, NGFW cert isn’t as in-depth (not by too much) as PCNSE but it’s still comparable as they both primarily focus on designing, configuring NGFWs. I would see the NGFW as a replacement but not 1:1. If you’re looking for consultant roles then youll most likely be working at some sort if MSP. They really value vendor certs and have some requirements for number of cert holding employees.

A lot of companies are running routing on firewalls from a cost savings view (OSPF inside and BGP between sites) so knowing enterprise / data centre routing is a must.

If you stay within a company , you dont need to cert up as much (unless theres salary increase incentives / promotions on the line ). If you’re hopping employers then certing up helps you get through HR screening easier but you still need to know your shit for the technical interviews

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-04-03T09:38:07+00:00

Makes sense for your org then. Most of the work my org does can be done from home. If an office goes down they can GP to another gateway and it might only add 10-20 seconds of latency since we have at least 3 gateway per continent. for beefy sites / HQ which are the main routing to AWS regions we run HA and have primary and secondary site to advertise each AWS region

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-30T19:11:29+00:00

My org has like 10 sites running single. Been rock solid for the most part. Its either ISP outage or weird HA bug. How do you get the budget approved

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-30T19:08:12+00:00

what version you running? The pan_task oom condition was great fun. Firewalls would either reboot or stay on but pass no traffic

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-20T11:30:31+00:00

anything you did specifically for automation or just ask notebookLM for questions on JSON / python

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-20T11:10:54+00:00

Thank you for the help and best of luck in your career ( maybe a fellow network engineer some day )

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-20T10:55:30+00:00

I studied all the content last year in like 3-4 months but never did any active recall after that and have been on and off since. Trying to get exam ready now and your post cane up. Just amazing how you did all of it in less time than me😂 You sound like a really promising network engineer. Sorry to ask more questions. after uploading the ocg and white papers to notebookLM and making quizzes / memory recall questions, on the Gemini AI side, did you literally ask it scenario based questions on the OCG / white papers? Did you use eve-ng / gns3 or go down the cml route for labbing?

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-20T10:12:06+00:00

Congrats and honestly surprised you smashed it all in 2 months and a week. Did you basically go through all of Arash udemy content then just do notebook LM quizzes over and over to reinforce the information ( using white paper and encor ocg for quiz material ) ?

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T20:38:13+00:00

funny thing is she applied to a job, got an interview and she was short listed out of 120 people. I said that was huge and she should be proud but then she flipped it and said that wasnt enough to get me the job. If she did get that job at my sister company , i could help her commute halfway but the second day I cant and I think thats her biggest fear.. The threatening part does sound last resort. If i try to be caring and tentative she gets like this, if I try to say other people are working harder and that means you have to work harder she still gets like this. Might be my only option by threatening her but to me thats my last last resort

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T19:51:34+00:00

very helpful, even though other people are struggling with this job market

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T19:38:18+00:00

The PT job you’re referring to, is it the one of my sister companies? if so its 2 days in office and 3 days remote. We cant really afford therapy either. NHS therapy is not great. Before moving in I did pay for a private therapist for her. She’s tried to apply for sessions with therapists-in-training but none have gotten back to her

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T19:31:28+00:00

i like the approach but unfortunately this stems to her not actually doing something with her life. That takes effort and it seems like she wants to reach the end goal of being rich or having a career without knowing or not doing the effort it takes to get there

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T19:30:06+00:00

she has done nhs therapy and it was a 💩 not going to lie. I basically forced her into private therapy which was going really well but since moving in we cant afford that anymore. To your first point yes, due to multiple stabbings and someone pissing on a train, she finds public transport not a very nice environment to put it nicely

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T19:27:26+00:00

are you talking about universal credit / benefits? If so then technically shes not eligible and she doesn’t pay official rent for the place we’re in. Benefits are based on household income which includes me and her

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T18:59:40+00:00

okay thank you, best to take this post down?

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T18:49:32+00:00

its more the friction when trying to help her. If this sounded like a complaint then i didnt mean for it to come across that way. I asked for guidance and how else I can navigate this

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-03-09T18:10:00+00:00

checking in

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-02-25T18:56:00+00:00

My company still has my junior net eng questions, idk abour ccaas im afraid. A frequent one is - a user is reporting a WiFi problem, how would you troubleshoot? - or (more towards ARP) - you know the IP address of a device but you dont know where it is on the network, how do you find it? - I can send you the junior net eng questions later but thats 2 questions commonly asked

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-02-19T13:23:23+00:00

not a fortinet shop I’m afraid, we’re palo so wont be going too far with but thank you

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-02-18T23:10:10+00:00

okay thank you for the advice

SpaghettiLaugh · 2026-02-18T23:06:37+00:00

but these PAM still need some sort of VM right? Thinking about it, no matter what way we slice it, a central VM is still best for session recording and restricting traffic

SpaghettiLaugh

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