It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog, and I have to say, that’s simply because I’ve been busy working, studying and taking part in CTFs!
I applied to a few graduate schemes in various industries including automotive, energy and finance, and managed to get to the final stages of all of them, however, it was just timing that got the better of me here with most graduates able to start in July, however, I don’t finish until October.
The experience was fantastic, and certainly gave me a lot more to think about and now, I’m in the position to say I’ve been accepted on a Doctoral Studentship at the University of Birmingham to complete a PhD assessing the Cyber Security of the UK Rail Network. Cool, eh? I’m looking forward to this, as really, I get a big train set and see what happens to ensure the safety and operation of our network on a daily basis. It’s this outcome that really appeals to me.
I’ve also been taken on in IT Services for a training scheme in our ServiceNow Development team as a Developer and Workflow Analyst, which got be back in the coding game, developing some interesting customisations and components to our ServiceNow platform, and understanding the full lifecycle of development here at Birmingham.
My Virtualisation Project is now underway with a new HP Microserver Gen8 sitting in my room with ESXi, and a few VMs including Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, Sophos UTM (which I must recommend) and a Ubuntu 15.04 LTS VM for testing, which will be the replacement for the ageing Windows Home Server machine that’s been happily running since 2008 in the home. When I move to Birmingham however, I’ll put in a more powerful host (probably a Dell PowerEdge T20/T110ii or a HP ProLiant ML310e Gen8 v2 Server) which will hopefully have a router VM (so I don’t have one of those ISP routers) and a SVN/Git server, as well as HipChat (since I’ve wanted to run one for a while to see what it’s like on your own bare-metal).
Anyway, that’s an update – there’ll be more to come.
RJT
May 2015