Catching Up

It's been a while since my last post on Nix and NixOs (which you can find here, if you're interested). A lot of changes have happened since then. I got my first job in Information Security as a SOC analyst which has deepened some of my skills and taught me new ones as well. I've improved my externally facing docker setup, including this website. And overall I've gotten more organized with my homelab setup.

On the NixOS front, I eventually got overwhelmed with all the new information and gave up, but not for long! After a month I tried again and once again bit off more than I could chew and gave up, but once again it was not for long! Just last week I started a fresh NixOs install on my main laptop as an incentive to really try and learn for the sake of productivity and to my surprise it's been a very pleasant and smooth experience. My laptop runs great and I have no complaints. I want to specifically shout out to Misterio77 on GitHub and his starter repo, it's a life saver that you can find here. I'm at a stable point, but I have improvements that I can make and things to learn including:

• Learning to install packages from separate repos (i.e. an unstable package when stable is the main repo). Essentially this means learning about overlays from what I can tell.
• Learning about sops-nix, this allows for the creation of secrets. Once I learn this, I'll be much more comfortable with sharing my Nix config.
• Learn the impermanence module for NixOs. This is a big one. It would basically be like a new server on every boot. Rebuild all the things!
• Better my understanding of the Nix language and Flakes

But enough about these (still) niche Linux distributions and package management. I'm also studying for my Network + in order to start gaining some knowledge in an area that I believe I could use some strengthening. At this point, I feel pretty good about everything, but I do need some time in order to study subnetting and doing that quickly. I've studied it before, but repetition is the mother of all learning and I need to buckle down on that.

One thing that concerns me about the Net + is that I don't have any professional networking experience. All my other certs have been in fields that I've spent a good amount of time with, but not networking. That being said, I know I can do this. I just need to keep studying and I'm lucky enough to have a homelab where I can test out some networking things if needed.