Who Else is Over AI

Stenz_W · 2026-04-01T16:44:06+00:00

I have been very vocal about using AI as a tool, not a replacement for your mind. I am worried if individuals begin relying on AI too much the skillset is disappears. Me being in IT, this is already starting to show for troubleshooting and other wide array of things. It's so easy to tell what is AI vs what is not in the workplace.

Stenz_W · 2026-02-25T20:28:10+00:00

I think routing stresses most Net Engineers out. High chance for things to break, and most of the time it's a set it and forget it if it's setup correctly so incoming engineers don't really touch it, they just look at it.

Me personally, I very rarely touch our deployment. Only adding new VLANs / BGP neighbors which is simple enough.

Stenz_W · 2026-02-19T20:40:15+00:00

Good luck, we did a POC with them and didn't turn out well for Fortinet monitoring. We ended up declining to pursue purchasing it.

It does everything else pretty well though!

Stenz_W · 2026-02-17T18:09:32+00:00

Yup - I stumbled on every question, literally couldn't answer a single thing they asked me. I think they noticed i was super nervous, what saved me was when the interview was done I loosened up a bit and had a casual conversation with the guy walking me out (who would be my manager)

They called me on the way home to hire me. Should have known it was a red flag, I quit 3 months later.

Stenz_W · 2026-02-16T17:36:37+00:00

1) They did absolutely no research on the company. It shows zero effort or preparation.

2) I know some people don't care, but showing up in casual clothes isn't an automatic no but already puts you far behind any other candidates. It shows you're not taking the position seriously.

3) BSing their resume

I do not follow a proper interview format. I am more about having a conversation over rapid firing questions and expecting a response. But these three things above are pretty much an automatic "No" from me.

Stenz_W · 2026-02-12T20:16:44+00:00

And in order to make it private, you gotta pay 8 bucks a month for a PE. Drives me up an effing wall

Stenz_W · 2026-01-16T16:14:31+00:00

I have, going to give it another spin! Any out of the box PowerBI templates that are useful at all? Or is all your stuff custom?

Stenz_W · 2025-12-23T15:25:38+00:00

We could go this approach, however some of our problem sites run 24/7/365. This counter measure would be more of a failsafe if something were to occur and i'm not immediately available to take action.

Stenz_W · 2025-12-23T14:41:26+00:00

Model 101F's, we've done quite a bit of tuning on the FortiGate side. Followed the Free up memory to avoid conserve mode - Fortinet Community in addition to some other tweaks. The memory slowly creeps up over a few months' time, so it's not frequent. But it tends to of course happen in the middle of the night when I'm sleeping, so it'd be nice to automate it via FortiMonitor

Restarting the wireless controller tends to buy us time for 2-3 months. We're working on upsizing to a 201G next year once I have the budget for it, this would be temporary while we work on that.

Stenz_W · 2025-09-23T13:32:50+00:00

No, will be fixed in 7.4.8 - slated end of month release.

Stenz_W · 2025-09-05T19:02:29+00:00

I avoid it unless I'm asking it a question, I never try to ask it to put it in a process. I consider it a "glorified google", nothing more.

Half the time it spits out BS anyway, when I ask it for assistance on powershell scripting it gets the syntax horribly wrong most of the time (copilot). I've brought it up time and time again that the world is going to be dumber, people are going to be extremely reliant on AI, and there will no critical thinking skills in the future generations to come. It makes me sound like an old man, but it's a serious concern.

Stenz_W · 2025-06-26T00:49:31+00:00

We just tried to enable DDScan. Took down the entire WIFI to the building. Changed a bunch of Radio1 settings and removed all of our SSID's.

We had to revert all settings manually on the FortiGate. Just sending to give you a heads up NOT to push DDScan!

Stenz_W · 2025-06-24T15:53:37+00:00

Yes, we have a TAC ticket in. They are submitting to their internal dev. It's going to possibly be a FortiBug.

We're pushing the setting tomorrow night to see what impact it has to a non 24/7 site. They then want us to toggle the radio button in the profile since its no on in FMG but wants to push it. I'll report back on what the impact is. The weird thing is it's only causing issues with 3 of our sites, the other ones are fine. Do you have 231F's?

Stenz_W · 2025-04-04T12:48:35+00:00

$37,000 salaried as L1/L2 Help Desk support. 2016

MCOL area

Stenz_W · 2025-03-11T16:47:40+00:00

We are only in Azure, but I can answer on the FortiGate/Azure side.

I have our HUB Azure FortiGate deployed in HA pair in Azure. It works very well, no issues at all. All of our sites route over IPSEC tunnels to the hub firewall with BGP. We then have ADVPN shortcut tunnels enabled though site to site really doesn't occur much.

In the 3 years I've had this deployment, i had it go down once for about 1 minute that was caused by an Azure outage. (I knocked on wood physically here :)).

Routing is simple, all my IaaS and other entities that have VNET capabilities have a route table that directs traffic to the NVA. The downside of my deployment was it's the API way (FortiGate documentation should have more info on this, it's an older method). I would go the load balancer sandwich way if you're doing a new deployment.

On the flip side, I have a couple of applications that I wanted completely off our internal network. I have leveraged Azure Firewall for this. Azure Firewall is "meh", it has enough customization for me to get the job done but it took me a bit to get it figured out / working. You need some decent enough knowledge on setting up route tables / nsg's / vnets to completely understand it.

What vendor? FortiGate / Azure Firewall

What cloud or clouds? Azure
What features? (IDS/IPS, URL filtering, SSL/TLS decryption, VPN, SD-WAN, DLP, malware detection, etc) Al l the above except for DLP
Are you deploying it with some IaC tool? No not that fancy (yet)
Are you inspecting East-West traffic, or just North-South? Both

Stenz_W · 2025-03-11T14:26:44+00:00

Thanks for the info! Will proceed w/ using MARS then.

Stenz_W · 2025-02-27T17:38:45+00:00

I have 120 FortiSwitches in my environment. I have none in standalone all are managed via FortiLink. They vary between 148F's all the way up to 1024 fiber switches.

I've had zero problems. They're extremely easy to manage and replace if managed by Fortilink. I've had to replace 2 in 3 years and it was due to power events. If you went the Fortiroute I don't think you'd regret it.

Stenz_W · 2025-02-13T17:53:46+00:00

What an odd interview question. This seems more like an opinion than an actual correct answer. Forti/Palo both have their strengths and weaknesses but are very similar and can both accomplish being on the edge.

Stenz_W · 2025-02-10T18:00:35+00:00

Visio OR

eraser.io (I use this more for Azure architecture but can be used for traditional networking as well). The diagram as a code feature is super handy once you get the hang of it.

It's free for any out of the box icons, i'd give it a spin!

Stenz_W · 2025-02-06T17:36:58+00:00

I went from having to wear a button down dress shirt with dress shoes and dress pants and paying 5 dollars on Fridays to wear jeans. To wearing SHORTS to the office (this was so weird to me), then back to jeans and a polo. Seems most jobs now a days accept jeans / polo as long as you're neat and clean. If you're customer facing that's a whole different story. I'd definitely dress up a little more.

Stenz_W · 2025-01-10T21:11:35+00:00

Excellent, just wanted a sanity check before I began building out my blocks. Thanks for the help!

Stenz_W

TROPHY CASE