List to Learn

As I sit here waiting for the server to do its backup, I wanted to make a quick list of things I need to look into.

VPN
I know how to use VPN, but how and where you set this up for others to use to access the network here is pretty new territory for me. We have one of the sales reps that would like to be able to do this, so I need to investigate how.

Disk Setups
As a friend of mine pointed out a while ago, I have a definite lack of hardware, both server side and really desktop side as well. I need to dig in and investigate and play with this a bit more. I definitely need to setup some RAID arrays at home so I can more fully understand how it works, and how to restore after a failure.

Secure FTP
They guys down south say we will have to add a server if we want to provide secure FTP, so I want to look into options and definitely understand how this is done.

Exchange
It goes without saying that I need to get up to speed quickly on this. I want to get the MS Press book and go from there.

AD
Have a book on this, just need to set aside time to actually read it. It needs to be a priority so that I am on schedule.

General Musings

Subnet Mask

I will never forget the first real technical question I had during an interview. I have worked in IT for a couple of years, but most of my interviews have been pretty informal so far.

Not this last one, and I found myself pretty unprepared. The first and last technical question I got was, "what is a subnet mask." Needless to say, I froze and could only point out that it divides the network. . which isn't quite right. A subnet mask divides an address into a network portion and a host portion.