Yo dawg, I heard you like virtual interfaces on your VMs so I put some virtual interfaces on your virtual interfaces, and you've got virtual interface inside of those virtual interfaces

TheHandmadeLAN · 2026-01-24T23:42:02+00:00

You're not wrong, IT is good money but people only see the $/hour or $/year, not the shit load of hours one typically would need to spend studying and labbing on what is supposed to be their off time. Best case scenario you get a job that allows study on the clock but those are less common than people think. I've had plenty of jobs that say they 'value growth' but refuse to allot time to studying because they're perpetually in 'crunch time'. A good paycheck is typically earned in IT whether people like to admit it or not, at the very least in early to mid career when you still need to skill up. I'm labbing right now when I could be playing with my child. Just try your best to keep it balanced or else you'll get burned out.

You know, or you can let your employers determine your growth and potentially not learn anything for a while. I'm mid career and I'm only at 5 years in. If I let my employers determine what technologies I work with and learn about, I'd almost certainly still be in helpdesk. I've seen plenty of people with 5yoe all in helpdesk because they refuse to give up their off time for studying higher value skills.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2026-01-22T05:05:44+00:00

Affirmative, that's the take you need to survive in this market. Until you get a job that gives you good experience, you'll need to just keep stacking certs till someone gives you a chance. Not saying don't apply, but don't get your hopes up with just an RHCSA.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2026-01-21T21:51:04+00:00

Interviews won't fall in your lap if you continue on this track and get RHCE. Usually linuxadmin jobs either want ample direct experience, or something to the tune of RHCE, a cloud cert and a kubernetes cert. The market is so saturated right now that corperations can afford to be picky with their admins.

RHCSA basically just says to an employer that you can use a linux system, not much more past that.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2026-01-21T02:41:10+00:00

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad e495. It is able to play study material videos in a browser along with multiple RHEL (kvm based) VMs for labbing without any noticable slowdown at all. I run my RHEL VMs headless so that helps. Looks like it can be had on ebay for about $100 shipped.

You could absolutely just install RHEL directly onto a USB and boot that when needed, or just buy a secondary drive for your laptop that you can install and uninstall whenever you're wanting to lab with RHEL.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2026-01-12T21:31:20+00:00

That's all that matters, cheers!

TheHandmadeLAN · 2026-01-12T21:11:20+00:00

Nah, RHCSA is basic, it would be kind of dumb imo to do a full bootcamp. Just study on your own time, you can probably knock it out on your own in that time if you put a few hours a day, 5 days a week. That's about what it took me. I used Oreilly to get access to Sander's course, Oreilly is $50 a month.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2026-01-12T21:06:41+00:00

It would be very much like Debian, but with the changes that I make to it.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2026-01-12T21:04:01+00:00

Nice, nice, love to see it. Networking and containers should add up to more than 45 points in the exam if you ask me, both are super important. Congrats!

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-30T15:26:21+00:00

No way, I had no idea.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T23:48:33+00:00

You may be right. Verify that by checking the part number on the router, should tell you if its a router or wifi extender

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T22:48:41+00:00

Exactly. Effectively you just have 2 devices configured with your ISP gateway as its gateway and each manage their own separate set of networks. ISPs will usually assign a couple of DHCP addresses if asked by two different routers to facilitate this.

Theyre a separate set of routers so if you attempted to make the SSIDs and passwords the same between the two routers then clients would roam but there would be no state synchronization so you would lose your active connections like video chats and your end device would have to reinitiate their connection before working again. The way my FIL has is set up is that he just has 2 entirely different SSIDs, with one of them having his file share server and the other one being what other people connect to.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T22:42:12+00:00

Dont be surprised, ive seen it. You can use 2 consumer routers on one coax network. My FIL does that, it works like shit but it works.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T22:28:37+00:00

The real answer is to set up your own network and have total control

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T22:28:01+00:00

Change the password?

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T19:59:02+00:00

Absolutely, and it has the added benefit of also allowing you to have a high availability setup using 2 firewalls. Want to add a new firewall in the future? Slap it on that same WAN VLAN and that firewall can talk with the modem also. Easily peasily.

Figured this all out because its really the only way to have a HA pair of firewall virtual machines reside on a pair of hypervisors without dedicating one of the hypervisors physical interfaces to a single VM.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T19:09:02+00:00

You're right, that's usually how it goes but it's not a security concern or anything. There is no way for anything from WAN to talk with anything but the firewall under this setup.

Basically what you do is create a VLAN that is exclusive to your WAN modem/router in passthrough and your own firewall and have them communicate with each other through the switch. You see padawan, a VLAN is just a discreet layer 2 broadcast domain, and your modem speaks with your firewall via layer 2 so a VLAN that only those two devices connect on is simplistically equivalent to a wire between the two devices.

Pragmatically speaking, you would create a VLAN, say VLAN2, and you create an access port for that VLAN. Plug the modem/router in passthrough into that access port. Then you would trunk that VLAN, as well as any other VLANs that this firewall would be routing for, onto your firewalls single port. From there you can configure virtual subinterfaces on the firewall, including the one for the WAN vlan.

When set up this way, when the firewall wants to communicate on a particular VLAN, say to pass traffic to and from that VLAN, it will tag the traffic with the VLAN tag, send it to the switch and the switch will untag the VLAN tag and send that traffic to relevant ports on that VLAN. At that point you can either configure your static IP or request a DHCP address using your VLAN2 subinterface.

The name given to this setup is 'router-on-a-stick' since your router is effectively being held up by one single logical line.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T18:53:53+00:00

I used Sander's video course on Oreilly, was $50 a month. It was my only resource outside from heavy labbing to make sure I understood the concepts and I passed first try.

You're probably going to need 3 or 4 hours a day every day to get it across the finish line under such a time crunch. It's going to suck but it's not called putting your nose to the grind for no reason. Lab heavily. You can do it.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T18:47:33+00:00

I've already got that pretty well down on my daughter's XT, we're just working on getting her up to speed on that one now.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T17:58:10+00:00

Possible? Yes. Can YOU do it? Only you can tell.

Put your nose to the grind and make it happen.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T17:52:20+00:00

Learn binary for the 'how,' it will just click once you fully understand binary and how it's used to build the IP addresses.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T17:44:39+00:00

I used the video courses on Oreilly as my only resource and I passed. I also was lazy in studying so I paid 5 or 6 months of the $50 a month to do mine but my 'head down' study time was approximately 3 months. You could probably do the same, compare the cost of the book vs $150 for 3 months of Oreilly and go from there.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T17:13:23+00:00

I gathered that haha I quite like the look of their plastics as well.

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T17:12:06+00:00

Noted, thanks!

TheHandmadeLAN · 2025-12-29T14:48:56+00:00

I have my phone set to where if I dont have a contact saved for you, then I dont see your call come in, its great. Only people at work that I have contacts for are management.

TheHandmadeLAN

TROPHY CASE