Marjorie Furay: Hello everybody.
Marjorie Furay: Welcome to master class.
Jean Velace: Goodnight.
Marjorie Furay: May 18th, 2023.
Marjorie Furay: And to think about that, I almost wrote 11.
Marjorie Furay: I'm a week behind.
Marjorie Furay: I'm OK.
Marjorie Furay: With all the classes, everything I'm training alright, we have 5 presenters this evening and we have some great topics.
Marjorie Furay: I'm looking forward to this.
Marjorie Furay: Let me tell you.
Marjorie Furay: Let's start with Tiffany Davidson.
Marjorie Furay: If you are ready.
Marjorie Furay: Alright.
Tiffany Davidson: Uh, sure, let's do this.
Marjorie Furay: Awesome.
Tiffany Davidson: OK.
Tiffany Davidson: Whoops.
Tiffany Davidson: Can you see my screen just to check?
Marjorie Furay: I I can.
Tiffany Davidson: OK.
Tiffany Davidson: Up there.
Tiffany Davidson: OK.
Tiffany Davidson: So good evening everyone.
Tiffany Davidson: I will be talking about the evolution of game development this evening.
Tiffany Davidson: I chose this topic because it's always been something I remember being a part of my life from watching my father play Halo to my sister and I playing on our game boys and taking turns on Crash Bandicoot.
Tiffany Davidson: So do you remember your first games?
Tiffany Davidson: You can tell me your first games or put it in the chat.
Tiffany Davidson: I remember the generic solitaire and mahjong I would play on my grandma's computer.
Tiffany Davidson: Another core memory I have is playing Super Mario brothers on my Game Boy Color.
Tiffany Davidson: What is yours?
Bradley Marker: I first game, which was actually my sisters, is on floppy disk.
Bradley Marker: We had a beauty and the Beast game.
Tiffany Davidson: Ohh wow, that's awesome.
Tiffany Davidson: Any others?
Landon Moore: Pong.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm.
Tiffany Davidson: I'll say that again.
Tiffany Davidson: Tone.
Antoniette Zaker: I remember, yeah.
Tiffany Davidson: Ohh go.
Antoniette Zaker: I remember playing Oregon Trail in probably middle school or grade school.
Antoniette Zaker: That's probably my earliest memory.
Tiffany Davidson: That's awesome.
Tiffany Davidson: I know that's like a mobile game now, so that's funny.
Antoniette Zaker: Uh, yeah, my kids found it.
Antoniette Zaker: I think online too.
Tiffany Davidson: Yeah.
Antoniette Zaker: Yeah.
Tiffany Davidson: OK.
Tiffany Davidson: So, do you know what the first video game I've vented is saying?
Tiffany Davidson: I wanna take a guess.
Andrew Pitmon: Pong.
Alexander Montgomery: I think it was Paul.
Jean Velace: The Tetris, I don't know.
Jean Velace: Ohh.
Tiffany Davidson: Well, actually the first video game was the first time by a British professor, AWS Douglas, making tic Tac toe, but the more well known and acknowledged first game that followed was tennis for two by William.
Tiffany Davidson: I'm gonna botch this name, but Higginbotham, we'll go further into that later.
Tiffany Davidson: But tennis for two then inspired a group of MIT students and Steve Russell for some reason.
Tiffany Davidson: Steve Russell is the relevant one.
Tiffany Davidson: It's just a group to design their own game.
Tiffany Davidson: They gained access to a PDP1 computer under three conditions from the university, according to the Smithsonian.
Tiffany Davidson: These conditions were first to utilize as many computer resources as possible and push the limits.
Tiffany Davidson: Second was to keep this program interesting by changing each run, and the last was to be able to interact with this game like tennis for two, where there were controllers.
Tiffany Davidson: This is how space war the dueling spaceships game was invented in order to play, though you needed access to a research facilities computer.
Tiffany Davidson: Umm, so developing games in the beginning was complex in different aspects than in today's world.
Tiffany Davidson: In the 1940s to 1950s, computers took up entire rooms and were extremely expensive.
Tiffany Davidson: Therefore, only universities, research facilities and larger companies could afford them.
Tiffany Davidson: And this made them less accessible to the public.
Tiffany Davidson: So when the first games were made, they allowed individuals to experience what computers are capable of.
Tiffany Davidson: Tennis for two was inspired by reading the instruction manual for the Donner Model 30 analog computer, which was a computer that could calculate ballistic missile trajectories.
Tiffany Davidson: This was due to the computer's ability to generate different types of curves on the cathode ray tube of an as a skill scope, and this picture right here shows and I'll skill scope.
Tiffany Davidson: The device is a test instrument that uses two different ways to show the electrical voltages of one or more signals.
Tiffany Davidson: The computer had two aluminum controllers that consisted of a knob and a button.
Tiffany Davidson: The button was pressed to hit the ball and knob to control the angle.
Tiffany Davidson: Higginbotham did not do this alone.
Tiffany Davidson: He had help from a technician named Robert B Boric.
Tiffany Davidson: The device took only three weeks to assemble, which amazes me, but this is the image of the PDP1 computer.
Tiffany Davidson: Ohh and here is a video of what tennis for two looked like being played.
Jean Velace: Wow.
Tiffany Davidson: Oops.
Tiffany Davidson: All no.
Tiffany Davidson: There we go.
Tiffany Davidson: There's the controller.
Tiffany Davidson: I'm not sure what that device was that they showed, but it seemed to go with the controllers so I thought that was pretty cool and a fun fact that I learned was that.
Tiffany Davidson: Higginbothan wanted to put it on another knob on the controller, but he didn't wanna make it too complicated, which made me laugh because nowadays controllers.
Tiffany Davidson: But how many buttons?
Tiffany Davidson: OK, so current game development has its own process and steps to go through in order to develop a game properly.
Tiffany Davidson: The steps are a lot like what we learned in project management with the addition of a few extra skills and tools needed to achieve the result in project management, you have steps to design and create your project.
Tiffany Davidson: This is the same with game developing.
Tiffany Davidson: It is a project after all.
Tiffany Davidson: First, you wanna pick a concept.
Tiffany Davidson: You wanna pick something?
Tiffany Davidson: You like that you're interested in?
Tiffany Davidson: You wanna ensure that you look and think about what is currently popular and if that aligns with their interests, you also want to write down as many game ideas as you can.
Tiffany Davidson: These can be.
Tiffany Davidson: This can be called freewriting.
Tiffany Davidson: You just write what comes to your mind and then you can build off of those idit ideas and concepts to make a game.
Tiffany Davidson: Lastly, you can be inspired by many things such as movies, books, music, TV series, how many games have we seen be made from a movie or even now in this day and age a game being made into a TV series?
Tiffany Davidson: Second, you want to gather information on the concept by researching the type of games you're building.
Tiffany Davidson: Are there certain things to be expected?
Tiffany Davidson: These are the questions you want to answer for yourself.
Tiffany Davidson: Filling out a game design document which can also be seen as a project charter, I have included a screenshot of my game design document from Unity in the junior programmer.
Tiffany Davidson: Here you can fill out all aspects of your game idea.
Tiffany Davidson: This will put down on paper what you want your game to be about.
Tiffany Davidson: The concept of goals for what you want to be happening within the game, every detail can be found in your game design document.
Tiffany Davidson: Next, do you wanna start building in order to build, you will need to pick a programming language and honestly, there were quite a few to pick, but the most popular according to Codecademy, is C++, which is followed by a JavaScript.
Tiffany Davidson: Once the language is picked, you can.
Tiffany Davidson: You then need to pick a game engine and the only knowledge I have of game engines is unity.
Tiffany Davidson: There were a lot of game engines to pick from, so it may be dependent upon your level of experience and what you need for your game.
Tiffany Davidson: And then this will be where you start coding for your game, which I know is the fun part.
Tiffany Davidson: And once your game is built, you wanna refine your concept.
Tiffany Davidson: Now you can start looking for any aspects that do not match up.
Tiffany Davidson: This could be the Settings Quest characters, all of the little details.
Tiffany Davidson: Does the concept still stand that you were going for is a story following logic once all the details are worked out, you can test your game.
Tiffany Davidson: You can do this yourself, but a fresh set of eyes would probably be most beneficial.
Tiffany Davidson: This could give you the user experience and that feedback could bring your game to the next level.
Tiffany Davidson: Outsourcing would mean QA or quality assurance.
Tiffany Davidson: Testers will play through your game multiple times and give you the proper feedback.
Tiffany Davidson: This can take a lot of time, but is necessary.
Tiffany Davidson: Lastly, you of course want to market your game.
Tiffany Davidson: You can do this by social media which there are so many platforms that can allow you to reach a large audience.
Tiffany Davidson: Though then and now the difference is amazing with how far technology has come.
Tiffany Davidson: Game development has made leaps and bounds from the first game to now.
Tiffany Davidson: The future holds many amazing things, such as virtual reality, but that is a different beast and I love seeing this picture of Tomb Raider because I remember my father playing that top game and all the noises of her trying to get up over those rocks and stuff.
Tiffany Davidson: And then here's the timeline of the beginning to almost current time of games.
Tiffany Davidson: This probably took me the most time because there was so much to go through, but I found it really interesting and so likes UM space invaders in 1978 is an arcade game and then a 1970 to 1980 PAC Man, which was Japan's most popular game and was released to the United States.
Tiffany Davidson: And then Donkey Kong is where we first met Mario or were introduced to and then in 1989 is when Super Mario brothers, the Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Tetris, which was only on the Game Boy at that time, were important.
Tiffany Davidson: Video game franchises still around to this day.
Tiffany Davidson: Then, in the 1990s, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are the reasons Sega created video game rating council since they were so violent and full of gore.
Tiffany Davidson: And then of course, you can't forget Sonic the Hedgehog and 2011 Skylander brought video games into the physical world by having plastic toy figurines.
Tiffany Davidson: That would be set on an accessory which reads the NFC tags and places them in the game.
Tiffany Davidson: And then, of course, 2012 brought the famous Angry Birds game, the mobile.
Tiffany Davidson: So and of course I put in the Last of Us since I mentioned the TV series.
Tiffany Davidson: Here are my references.
Tiffany Davidson: Thanks for listening to me ramble about games.
Tiffany Davidson: If you guys have any questions, I'll try to answer them.
Marjorie Furay: Excellent job way to bring us back in time.
Tiffany Davidson: Thank you.
Marjorie Furay: I'm sure we've all played so many of them.
Tiffany Davidson: Yes.
Marjorie Furay: Also, it was great.
Marjorie Furay: All right.
Marjorie Furay: Antoniette, Are you ready?
Antoniette Zaker: Uh, yes, I'm ready.
Marjorie Furay: Alright.
Antoniette Zaker: Let me figure out how to share.
Antoniette Zaker: My stuff.
Antoniette Zaker: Do I hit the share button and then umm the PowerPoint?
Marjorie Furay: Yes.
Antoniette Zaker: OK.
Marjorie Furay: Share in are you gonna be sharing any sound or anything?
Antoniette Zaker: Ohh not live, no.
Marjorie Furay: OK.
Antoniette Zaker: OK.
Antoniette Zaker: And then how do I do I change the layout or is this good?
Andrew Pitmon: It looks good.
Antoniette Zaker: Can everybody see the whole content or I've never used Microsoft Teams?
Antoniette Zaker: OK, cool.
Antoniette Zaker: Thank you so much so.
Antoniette Zaker: Why isn't it not showing?
Antoniette Zaker: Ah, there we go.
Antoniette Zaker: OK, so sorry everybody, I got it now.
Antoniette Zaker: Inspired by my day job, so I am not in IT and I'm doing a whole career change, so it's really interesting to me to begin to understand how unprepared and uneducated I guess we are as a society and how we treat our data.
Antoniette Zaker: So like 4 year old play on iPads.
Antoniette Zaker: You know their parents, phones, teenagers are on their phones constantly.
Antoniette Zaker: They bring their own devices to school and hook up to the guest Wi-Fi.
Antoniette Zaker: So like all of this was kind of inspired by my day job, which is a high school teacher, and you can imagine it's it's, uh, it's pretty interesting looking at it from this perspective.
Antoniette Zaker: So we know that.
Antoniette Zaker: I mean, I I don't even know how many papers I wrote.
Antoniette Zaker: Humans are the wincest weakest link and and I just really wanted to understand what that really means.
Antoniette Zaker: So I kind of looked at the data and it was actually really mind boggling to me.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, there is a little discrepancy on some of the reports that have been published.
Antoniette Zaker: Verizon there are 2022 data Breach Investigations report said that 82% of data breaches are due to the human element, either through like social engineering, misuse, mistake.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, the World Economic Forum and the IBM cyber security.
Antoniette Zaker: Intelligent index said that 95% of cyber security compromises are due to human error.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm.
Antoniette Zaker: And of course, that is costing millions of dollars per breach.
Antoniette Zaker: And what's what I find really interesting is that you're almost the US almost 44 breaches as opposed to the global average.
Antoniette Zaker: And so I've kind of like looked into this more fully, I guess and try to figure out what could we do as I guess as a society or as IT professionals to help stem this.
Antoniette Zaker: So human error like basically these are all unintentional actions that lead to a security breach.
Antoniette Zaker: So some are just do based on actually being tired, right?
Antoniette Zaker: Like typing in the wrong email address or.
Antoniette Zaker: Accidentally sharing a document we shouldn't have shared.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, you know, and the only thing that we could really do to maybe stem this is work less, but I don't see that actually happening in in our society.
Antoniette Zaker: But where we can make a difference is decision based errors.
Antoniette Zaker: So these are errors that are coming from employees because they have the lack of knowledge and training, so they do not understand the risks that they're taking or the the like.
Antoniette Zaker: The risks that in action is taken like not password protecting a certain file.
Antoniette Zaker: So I came up with the basics.
Antoniette Zaker: Of course, there's many, many many solutions, but I came up with three solutions or three things to look at.
Antoniette Zaker: Specifically, we can assume the worst so humans aren't gonna be doing better.
Antoniette Zaker: So we are gonna have to be really on top of making policies to ensure our data is protected.
Antoniette Zaker: We can educate and I'm talking about cross the board K through 12 in schools.
Antoniette Zaker: The older generation in our jobs, or we could throw money at it, which is always a solution to everything.
Antoniette Zaker: So when I mean, assume the worst, I mean that employees are gonna have problems with everything that IT professionals do.
Antoniette Zaker: So maybe we are the problem.
Antoniette Zaker: We make it too hard for them to do their jobs and follow these policies that we're creating.
Antoniette Zaker: So I found this study and I thought this was really interesting that 95% of employees have decreased productivity because of IT strategies.
Antoniette Zaker: So our policies are not working for them and of course, you know, all these companies wanna make a lot of money.
Antoniette Zaker: And if we're stemming that productivity, it's gonna be a huge problem.
Antoniette Zaker: So they're not gonna budget the IT department properly.
Antoniette Zaker: And most of these problems are happening approximately 37% because of security policies.
Antoniette Zaker: So maybe the IT department is the problem.
Antoniette Zaker: So what could we do?
Antoniette Zaker: So just of course, there's many, many things we could do, but I just wanted to think about password policies.
Antoniette Zaker: I know like we here in this internship.
Antoniette Zaker: Have you some of these strategies?
Antoniette Zaker: But where I work, we don't, so there's a possibility that we might find ourselves in jobs that don't have the up-to-date password policies.
Antoniette Zaker: So I thought it was really interesting that even though like stolen or compromised, credentialing did not take umm, like are not the highest risk, they are the hardest to identify.
Antoniette Zaker: So like, they took the longest to find.
Antoniette Zaker: So 327 days?
Antoniette Zaker: Which translates into a costly breach.
Antoniette Zaker: So what could we do?
Antoniette Zaker: So the National Institute of Standards and Technology has produced something new.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm.
Antoniette Zaker: And maybe you've seen it before, but they are saying don't require password reset.
Antoniette Zaker: So the human mind works very similar across the board, so people have a hard time remembering passwords.
Antoniette Zaker: So we have a very easy to guess passwords.
Antoniette Zaker: There's a top 1000.
Antoniette Zaker: I mean, I'm sure there's even more of that, and people tend if we make it more difficult or they have to make their password more difficult or reset it a lots of times where they can't use the same one, they write it down also don't increase complexity.
Antoniette Zaker: It actually doesn't show any significant security increases like people are just gonna put the at sign for an A. I mean, I do it, too or for ohh.
Antoniette Zaker: I'd put a 0 or whatever, but a lot of people just change their password by just adding those little little things, and then all of this is causing high cost so people forget their passwords, it causes more resources used in the IT help desk.
Antoniette Zaker: It decreases efficiency and it really has a taxing on the human memory.
Antoniette Zaker: So what we could do, and there's a new approach and like I said, we've I've seen some of them here.
Antoniette Zaker: I'm constantly screening passwords for the most commonly used or those that are present in Word lists.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm.
Antoniette Zaker: Prior passphrases that increase in length and allow spaces, we can eliminate reset.
Antoniette Zaker: So if we are continuously screening these passphrases, then we are stopping kind of these reoccurring breaches.
Antoniette Zaker: So like every time it's breached, they, you know, we gain, umm, more passphrases and passwords that are placed into a word list somewhere.
Antoniette Zaker: And also we can decrease burden on our memory by supporting single sign ONS which we do here I'm supporting multiple authentication methods biometrics one time password devices so that we have a lot of options and this is something being on top of the research is gonna be really important on the other thing is educate which of course I I strongly recommend so got to delete that part but anyways so this week quickly changed our landscape like schools work health all our daily routine like ordering our groceries streaming all of this is now online and it came really fast for a lot of us I know in my District League we weren't ready for any of this to take place and what I find really interesting is that are ranked tenth amongst the whole world on our cyber risk literacy and education index rankings and a part of that is not being properly educated and that our policy is behind some of these other countries.
Antoniette Zaker: The thing is, I'm like.
Antoniette Zaker: Ohh, maybe we don't really know how to use our computers properly, but we do have high digital literacy like our breeches cost more.
Antoniette Zaker: So we understand how or the society understands how to use a computer, and we're literate at it, but we're not understanding the proper security for it.
Antoniette Zaker: So, umm, we really we need to increase cybersecurity awareness training and I think it has to go like starting early education and K through 12 should have some type of security training.
Antoniette Zaker: Teachers are not trained to protect data.
Antoniette Zaker: They're not trained to tell their students how to protect protect data, but we should begin young.
Antoniette Zaker: There should be post high school cyber training.
Antoniette Zaker: We should have action plans, so a lot of these governments that are doing really good with cybersecurity or cyber risk literacy had these programs across the board, all age groups, they have action plans, they look at gold that they want to achieve and they use metrics to track their progress.
Antoniette Zaker: And then I know Switzerland's number one.
Antoniette Zaker: A lot of the ones that are ahead of us and paying less for these breaches, they don't have a diverse society like we do.
Antoniette Zaker: So there is gonna have to be some understanding that we have to.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, really?
Antoniette Zaker: Tailor our training for a digger diverse group of people.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, Singapore was actually number one in cyber risk education and everybody had a specific role or job.
Antoniette Zaker: Like if they were in school, they had goals for them on how to protect their data. I think.
Antoniette Zaker: Would another generation like the older generation, the senior citizens are really falling through their track the crack?
Antoniette Zaker: I mean, they're getting easily and they're not being hacked necessarily, but cyber criminals are going after these older generations and playing like these phishing emails, text things like that.
Antoniette Zaker: And they are actually losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because they don't really understand umm cyber risk.
Antoniette Zaker: So when I talk about cyber risk education, I'm talking across the board all age groups and the IT world.
Antoniette Zaker: We really don't control policy and things like that, so we have to be aware, depending on what our role is, that the employees that are coming into us don't have the knowledge that we do and we really need to be Cognizant about it and understanding how to train and keep on training.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, funny enough, we actually do have and.
Antoniette Zaker: And we're not bad at everything in the United States.
Antoniette Zaker: So we do have an education and training assistance program that is a grant through the CSA that supports K through 12, curriculum development and instruction training.
Antoniette Zaker: It's been around for over a decade.
Antoniette Zaker: I'm actually a stem teacher and I've never heard of this.
Antoniette Zaker: Program, I think they said that they've had over 500,000 teachers or students were were somehow affected by this program, but with the funding that it has now and how many teachers they they are able to give grants to, it would take 95 years to educate all stub teachers.
Antoniette Zaker: So that's obviously way too long and things are just changing way too fast for this to even make a dent and to the K through 12 schooling and then every year they want to eliminate the funding.
Antoniette Zaker: So this successful program, but they wanna eliminate it.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, the other thing to consider is reteaching, so the 2022 IBM data said that 83% of organizations were repeaters, which I thought was crazy.
Antoniette Zaker: I I would imagine that you really buttoned up your security, you reteach you look at your policies, but apparently that's not the case.
Antoniette Zaker: So we have to constantly reteach and think of proper learning plans for when breaches occur.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm.
Antoniette Zaker: So just to go over kind of the education part, we should probably, I again, we're only in IT industry like we don't make policy but I believe create cybersecurity and cyber risk education for all increase governmental policies and oversight at least with education and maybe providing targets and goals.
Antoniette Zaker: We have a lot of different departments that kind of like throw their hat in the ring.
Antoniette Zaker: So maybe having one department have central like, you know, like a central location for everything would be great.
Antoniette Zaker: And then Reteach job specific cyber security and then the last idea I had was to throw money at it and obviously artificial intelligence and automation is huge and it's still growing.
Antoniette Zaker: And The thing is, the IBM report said that that increase breach detection.
Antoniette Zaker: So we know the faster refined breaches, the less money it costs, the less data that is out there.
Antoniette Zaker: So with AI or automation it was 74 days quicker to uh find a breach which saved about $3 million per breach.
Antoniette Zaker: So they can detect new threats faster.
Antoniette Zaker: We have faster incident response planning.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm can it could process large amounts of data in a short period of time and then find anomalies quicker?
Antoniette Zaker: Of course, it's very costly.
Antoniette Zaker: So you would need more resources to it.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, not only just financially but umm.
Antoniette Zaker: While financially umm time, the other thing is it's false positives and it can be used by threat actors as well.
Antoniette Zaker: So there's this fine line and I think if we take the whole picture into consideration, a good plan can be in place to help, like, uh, stop all these breaches and the amount of money that it's costing us as a society in the US.
Antoniette Zaker: Umm.
Antoniette Zaker: And it could even be really like a national problem here.
Antoniette Zaker: You know, I'll of the breaches that are happening on Facebook, all the misinformation that's occurring.
Antoniette Zaker: If we were a better trained society, hopefully we could stem some of these big issues and big things that are happening.
Antoniette Zaker: So in summary, humans are the weakest link like we know about that we really need to be on top of the research and it's gonna be constantly changing.
Antoniette Zaker: Educate, educate, educate and we need more money and we need to be aware of research trends.
Antoniette Zaker: Are there any questions?
Jean Velace: Yes, good evening.
Antoniette Zaker: Sure.
Jean Velace: I have one question and I always wanted to ask this of for a while and ohh for the single sign on.
Jean Velace: That it does provide convenience and the sense that if you have 20 different and I don't have a bunch of different websites.
Jean Velace: Amazon, eBay.
Jean Velace: Uh, different scientific websites.
Jean Velace: They they'd school a whole bunch.
Jean Velace: So let's say for example, how does it work?
Jean Velace: How does it get chance to look into it?
Jean Velace: If I use one password, that same password applies, so all of those individual sites, it's like I'm going through it.
Jean Velace: Is it like I'm going through an intermediary?
Antoniette Zaker: Umm, I was as I understand the only single sign on I've ever used is the one we used here for the Microsoft suite of of like the Planner, the Outbox.
Antoniette Zaker: It's umm, I think it really.
Jean Velace: OK.
Antoniette Zaker: That's the only one that I've actually used personally, like at my job we don't use it, so I under as I understand it, it's per probably umm company, right?
Antoniette Zaker: Like the same manufacturer I would imagine.
Antoniette Zaker: Yeah, I could be wrong.
Jean Velace: OK, I understand because I was wondering that always bothered me a if I use one password that's ohh.
Jean Velace: OK.
Antoniette Zaker: I could be wrong.
Jean Velace: Well, maybe, yeah, maybe later on.
Jean Velace: I'll because I always was concerned, but I used one for eBay, the same one for the Department of Education, the same one for the IRS, the same one for something else.
Jean Velace: And then that one, that's one password gets compromised.
Jean Velace: And then I was wondering, uh, does it leave all of the individual sites with a massive vulnerability that that that's what could only thing the uh, it's convenient, very efficient, fast everything.
Antoniette Zaker: Yeah.
Jean Velace: But that one thing concerned me. Uh.
Antoniette Zaker: And you know, I think a lot of people do that, though they have one password that they use for everything, and they don't even think about breaches that have occurred at all.
Jean Velace: OK.
Antoniette Zaker: And even if they're notified, they don't change it like we just had a breach and a third party vendor for something called school school.
Antoniette Zaker: Dude, which was our maintenance.
Antoniette Zaker: It's just maintenance.
Antoniette Zaker: Like, can you turn down the temperature or bring paper towels?
Jean Velace: Ohh.
Antoniette Zaker: Or I have a link leak in my sink, you know, and those passwords were reached, and a lot of my colleagues didn't change their password, and it was something that, like, you know, it was not even that important to begin with.
Antoniette Zaker: And they don't even think that they've used the same one over and over again.
Jean Velace: Interesting.
Jean Velace: School district.
Jean Velace: Are you or what?
Antoniette Zaker: I'm in Michigan.
Jean Velace: What's that? That's.
Antoniette Zaker: I'm in Michigan, so I'm in Plymouth, Canton.
Antoniette Zaker: It's a pretty big, like fourth biggest in Michigan.
Jean Velace: OK.
Antoniette Zaker: OK.
Antoniette Zaker: I wonder if it's the same thing.
Jean Velace: It's interesting you say that we just had a breach here, but it's had a charter school where I work, so I stopped using my personal email.
Antoniette Zaker: That's weird, yeah.
Jean Velace: Yeah.
Jean Velace: Yeah, it's just interesting.
Jean Velace: I wonder if it's the same Brenda, I don't know, but thank you.
Antoniette Zaker: Yeah.
Antoniette Zaker: Thank you.
Antoniette Zaker: Anybody else?
Antoniette Zaker: Thank you.
Antoniette Zaker: Here are my references.
Antoniette Zaker: I'm good then.
Antoniette Zaker: Thank you so much everybody.
Marjorie Furay: Excellent.
Jean Velace: Right.
Marjorie Furay: Brought up a lot of great points.
Marjorie Furay: Definitely.
Marjorie Furay: You know, even within schools, they don't think about it, they don't.
Antoniette Zaker: No.
Antoniette Zaker: Ohh it's.
Antoniette Zaker: I mean, it's pretty terrible.
Antoniette Zaker: Like I know, universities probably think about it more, but like the the K through 12, like just looking at my district now from a from, you know, with open eyes like our server room is unlocked.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah.
Marjorie Furay: Then it.
Antoniette Zaker: Like really anybody can get in there and we have so much important data, so much sensitive data.
Jean Velace: Wow.
Marjorie Furay: It's true.
Marjorie Furay: And you know, and even my kids on their own desktops, you know, they've done whatever and they're like, oh, I think I just got hacked and like, well, you better clean it up now.
Antoniette Zaker: I know.
Marjorie Furay: And I said and start and you know, because I'm not gonna keep cleaning up your computer.
Marjorie Furay: You're gonna lose everything.
Marjorie Furay: Luckily, they don't have anything that's really, you know, that they'll lose.
Marjorie Furay: That is so bad because everything they have is in steam anyways, but.
Marjorie Furay: I don't want them on the network and I am secure enough within the network to not worry about it.
Marjorie Furay: But you know, I've told them you need to use LastPass.
Marjorie Furay: Just let LastPass have it.
Marjorie Furay: It'll have something that's secure.
Marjorie Furay: You won't have to worry about it.
Marjorie Furay: And then you're all set.
Marjorie Furay: Use it with your.
Marjorie Furay: You know, there's so many things now that we can use.
Marjorie Furay: It just makes things easier.
Marjorie Furay: Don't try and come up with your own.
Marjorie Furay: Just use LastPass.
Marjorie Furay: The only one you need to remember is the password for LastPass.
Marjorie Furay: That's it.
Antoniette Zaker: Which will probably be in the top like 1000 right most common.
Marjorie Furay: Right, exactly.
Jean Velace: Yeah.
Marjorie Furay: It don't make it too hard on yourself, right?
Antoniette Zaker: Right.
Antoniette Zaker: Yeah, the the human mind can't handle it.
Antoniette Zaker: We can't handle the passwords.
Marjorie Furay: And I know, right?
Abimbola Ogunfuye: I have a little bit contribution.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Sorry.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Uh, this is Abimbola.
Marjorie Furay: Yes.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Yeah, the issue of training should be taken seriously and I believe it affects everybody.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: I could remember some few weeks back.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: My wife got a pop up on this laptop on her laptop and she accidentally click the pop up and had a Google accounts compromised.
Marjorie Furay: Yep.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: So I had to like look this is a very big issue.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: We have to find a way out.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: So at first I had to like see what do I do?
Abimbola Ogunfuye: I tried to delete the account first because she has two accounts, 2 Google accounts on the same laptop.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: So I suggested to add that we have to like delete the first one.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: So by the time we go into the other one, we can easily have access.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: So I try to delete the first one to at least limit the impact of the compromise.
Marjorie Furay: Yep.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: So which simply means that we really need to educate our people more and that should cause the cross.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Every other organization appearance, our loved ones, our sisters, our brothers and everybody.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah, everybody.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: So the aspect of training should go far, which I tried actually support until Nets.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: It's very important.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: So just just by contribution.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Thank you.
Antoniette Zaker: Thank you.
Marjorie Furay: Yes, you're absolutely right.
Marjorie Furay: It has to start somewhere.
Marjorie Furay: That's right.
Marjorie Furay: Thank you everybody.
Marjorie Furay: That was that was awesome.
Marjorie Furay: Antoniette.
Marjorie Furay: That's very nice.
Marjorie Furay: Very good one.
Antoniette Zaker: Thank you.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah.
Marjorie Furay: There you go exactly.
Antoniette Zaker: I'll think my teenagers at school for that one, and my own, actually, but mostly them.
Marjorie Furay: Yep, it helps to get their right because it makes their brain works a different way too.
Marjorie Furay: If they help you, you know what are, what are the processes, what do we need to do?
Marjorie Furay: Where do we start from?
Marjorie Furay: It's really good because it gets the critical thinking going.
Marjorie Furay: That's right.
Marjorie Furay: All right, now we've got uh Rabia.
Rabia Ather: Yeah.
Marjorie Furay: Right.
Rabia Ather: Hello everyone.
Rabia Ather: How is everyone doing today?
Marjorie Furay: Good.
Marjorie Furay: How are you?
Jean Velace: Hello.
Rabia Ather: I'm good.
Rabia Ather: OK, let me share my screen.
Rabia Ather: Do you guys see anything?
Marjorie Furay: No.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Not yet.
Bradley Marker: Nope.
Rabia Ather: Umm.
Rabia Ather: I'm not sure if I did this right.
Marjorie Furay: Yep, I see it now.
Tiffany Davidson: We see your.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Yeah, we're good.
Rabia Ather: OK, well it looks so different from my side.
Rabia Ather: I don't know.
Rabia Ather: Used to this.
Marjorie Furay: Right.
Landon Moore: Now you know, I thought.
Landon Moore: Always ask can you see my screen?
Rabia Ather: Yeah.
Marjorie Furay: It's.
Rabia Ather: Now, I know, Landon, this is so old.
Rabia Ather: God, OK.
Rabia Ather: Uh, the best part is, I can't see what.
Rabia Ather: OK, OK.
Rabia Ather: So to begin with, uh, I'm Rabia and I am going to uh, present about DevOps model today.
Rabia Ather: It's uh for me.
Rabia Ather: Uh, for me to choose this topic, it's a funny story, because whenever I heard the word devolves, I always thought it's like a field of a IT or something.
Rabia Ather: But after I did some research on it, I realized it's not a job title, but it's just a methodology that organizations here to list for them to better uh, to better uh, make their teams work.
Rabia Ather: So let's see what develops is, uh, the DevOps is a software development methodology approach which is utilized by organizations that combines developments that stuff and operations opts to unite people, process and technology in application planning, development, delivery and operations.
Rabia Ather: So develops, enables coordination and collaboration between different departments like development, IT operations, quality engineering and security.
Rabia Ather: The introduction of DevOps was done because in traditional software development the development phase was completed 1st and then the deployment operation, especially during the code deployment.
Rabia Ather: There have been many interruptions because of the latent problems.
Rabia Ather: So for that to fix it, the face was getting so TDM so and they were further disagreements happening between the teams and operations.
Rabia Ather: Uh.
Rabia Ather: The team, the development teams, would blame the server side and then the operation would the the blame on the server side when the meet.
Rabia Ather: So when the need for the updates arose, the persistence of this contention would go at the same rate.
Rabia Ather: So that's when the DevOps steps in and that's when the DevOps was developed.
Rabia Ather: Teams adopt DevOps culture, practices and tools to increase confidence in applications they build.
Rabia Ather: They they are able to respond better to customer needs and they are able to achieve business goals faster.
Rabia Ather: DevOps helps teams continually provide value to customers by producing better, more reliable products.
Rabia Ather: Umm, some other benefits of DevOps include, umm, the teams are in DevOps responsible for development and operations are no longer siloed.
Rabia Ather: Uh, so there?
Rabia Ather: Uh, they can.
Rabia Ather: They don't under they don't work individually.
Rabia Ather: Sometimes two teams are combined to form a single team where the engineers work across the whole application lifecycle, from development to test deployment and operations.
Rabia Ather: And they also build varieties of.
Rabia Ather: They also work on varieties of abilities that are not restricted to a particular role, so teams employ procedures to speed up the task that were previously labor intensive and manual, and that also decreases the interruptions.
Rabia Ather: They employ technological stack tooling, and that's facilitate the speedy, dependable operations and evolution of applications.
Rabia Ather: Uh, overall, the use of these tools enables engineers to complete task and that will that previously required assistance from other teams, which further boost the teams velocity.
Rabia Ather: So the advantages of develops is the helps in better collaboration between development and operations.
Rabia Ather: It improved the quality of products, it reduces the design development and operations.
Rabia Ather: It reduces the time to market what the products for customers to consume.
Rabia Ather: It increases the profits and there is more frequent releases of the products for consumers to able to use.
Rabia Ather: So there are four phases in develops that helps teams to organize their UM way of a operation.
Rabia Ather: So the first one is the planning phase, and the waps teams brainstorms.
Rabia Ather: They specify the describe the functions and features of the system and application they intend to develop.
Rabia Ather: During this phase they the teams monitor task progress on low and high granularity level from single products to many products portfolio.
Rabia Ather: They plan the agility and visibility some of the practices they applied during this phase is they create backlogs, they monitor bugs, they utilize scrum to oversee Agile software development.
Rabia Ather: The employee can ban bots and they use dash dashboards to visualize the progress.
Rabia Ather: Uh, in the next uh phase, the the next one is development phase in which the entire process of writing software code is covered.
Rabia Ather: So in the so the DevOps in the development phase, the team is responsible to pick a setting for development.
Rabia Ather: The right test review and integrate the code.
Rabia Ather: They create IT graphs to from the code to deploy it to different settings and they they collaborate on code and work on it continuously.
Rabia Ather: They also innovate in in development phase.
Rabia Ather: They also innovate quickly while maintaining quality, stability and productivity.
Rabia Ather: Uh, for which they use effective tools, automate, automate tedious and manual processes and.
Rabia Ather: The utilize the CI.
Rabia Ather: I can't see you on that, sorry.
Rabia Ather: They utilize automated testing and continuous integration in small steps.
Rabia Ather: Next is the operation phase.
Rabia Ather: In face of and no woman did I.
Rabia Ather: Yes, I skipped a face.
Rabia Ather: So next is the delivery phase in which they practice to retaining and reliably deploy software into production setting, ideally through the continuous delivery throughout the delivery phase.
Rabia Ather: This establish a release management procedure that includes distinct manual approval stages.
Rabia Ather: They set up an automatic gate to advance applications to different faces until they are released to clients.
Rabia Ather: They deploy and configure the basic infrastructure of the delivery environment, which increases the stability.
Rabia Ather: Repeat repeatability control and obviously the whole business of delivery operation by automating them they finally create completed or regulated infrastructure setting and the teams leverage technologies like.
Rabia Ather: Iac, containers and microservices.
Rabia Ather: It is important to remember the safe employment procedures can spot problems before they have an impact on client satisfaction, so this phase is really important.
Rabia Ather: This technique support DevOps teams and delivering regularly with comfort assurance and peace in mind before the final phase.
Rabia Ather: The final phase is the operation phase in which the application in production environments, including hybrid or public clouds like Azure, are maintained.
Rabia Ather: Their watchtower.
Rabia Ather: And their troubleshooted and the system, dependability, high availability and solid security and zero down time are the goals of the DevOps team in the final phase in this phase, team can immediately detect the problems, they can address it, they can, they can use the automated delivery for the deployment procedures, they can use the rich telemetry which is uh, visualization, actionable alerting and they can complete insight into applications and underlying system that are all necessary to maintain the vigilance.
Rabia Ather: So some of the tools that DevOps use are continuous integration, continuous delivery, microservices, monitoring, logging, communication and most importantly collaboration of the whole team.
Rabia Ather: Umm, the importance of DevOps in today's world is that the adoption has nearly doubled in the last five years.
Rabia Ather: According to survey 3200 businesses conducted, which is conducted by Redgate Software DevOps have now been embraced in some form by approximately 74% stage of the enterprises.
Rabia Ather: And according to according to 2020 DevOps strengths survey, uh, uh.
Rabia Ather: It sides that 99% of the respondents say it has a positive impact on their organization, 78% had to learn a new skill.
Rabia Ather: 48% of the respondents said it helped them get a raise, 61 say it helped them produce higher quality development.
Rabia Ather: Deliverables and 49% say they have faster time to market, 49% say it improves their deployment frequency.
Rabia Ather: So overall, the survey summarize this why it is important.
Rabia Ather: And how effective uh DevOps approach was in today's world?
Rabia Ather: In conclusion, the effective tooling is essential in DevOps because it enables teams to develop for their customers.
Rabia Ather: Uh develop a products for the customers and they can deploy the software quickly and reliably.
Rabia Ather: These solutions led the teams manage complicated system at larger scale and they can automate TDs chores and keeps engineers in charge of the high velocity with no interruptions.
Rabia Ather: And due to DevOps, the teams that excel in DevOps can develop a growth attitude which we saw in the survey.
Rabia Ather: Uh, they make a quick adjustments after failing and apply their lessons.
Rabia Ather: Uh, they all work hard to maintain the correct level of excellence and due to which they raised the client satisfaction and quicken the innovation and market responsiveness and that's it.
Rabia Ather: Thank you.
Marjorie Furay: That was great.
Marjorie Furay: That's excellent.
Marjorie Furay: I didn't know that much about DevOps, so thank you.
Rabia Ather: And thank you.
Marjorie Furay: You taught me because I thought like you.
Marjorie Furay: I thought it was something like, you know, specific direction to go into the field, but now I know that it's a modeling.
Marjorie Furay: That's pretty cool.
Rabia Ather: I know that's all cartoon. Mm-hmm.
Marjorie Furay: Good way to see things.
Marjorie Furay: Thank you so much.
Rabia Ather: Does anybody have any other questions?
Rabia Ather: OK.
Marjorie Furay: Thank you.
Rabia Ather: OK, OK.
Marjorie Furay: All right, Nicholas.
Marjorie Furay: Nicholas Wolf, Are you ready?
Nicholas Wolf: Think so?
Nicholas Wolf: Yeah.
Nicholas Wolf: Share my screen.
Nicholas Wolf: Can everybody see that?
Landon Moore: Yes.
Marjorie Furay: Yes.
Bradley Marker: Yes.
Jean Velace: Yes.
Nicholas Wolf: OK, no.
Marjorie Furay: Are you speaking because we can't hear you if you want.
Marjorie Furay: Oh, OK, no problem. Alright.
Marjorie Furay: OK.
Marjorie Furay: Alright.
Nicholas Wolf: The state of finished, so I wanted to make it super easy for future interns to just grab this project and change it or add or delete questions as the as the websites update without even needing to understand any of the code, they can just go into unity and change.
Marjorie Furay: I think we lost him again.
Marjorie Furay: Umm.
Marjorie Furay: I'm looking to see what you have on you have a lot on in the background that might be.
Marjorie Furay: Taking resources for for teams.
Landon Moore: Because we're still seeing your screen.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah.
Nicholas Wolf: Ah, my end.
Nicholas Wolf: It's not showing that I'm sharing it.
Marjorie Furay: And if you want to shut down some other stuff that you've got on.
Nicholas Wolf: Uh, I don't think I have much on.
Nicholas Wolf: I just have.
Nicholas Wolf: Stuff that I'm showing.
Nicholas Wolf: Ah well, let's try it again.
Nicholas Wolf: OK, so here's the start menu.
Nicholas Wolf: You see the.
Nicholas Wolf: AC logo up here. Uh.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah, that's funny.
Marjorie Furay: It does keep kicking you out and see.
Marjorie Furay: Some of those other icons seems like you need to have them on but.
Marjorie Furay: What we could do is go to Andrew, let him do it, and if you want to reset your computer, we start it.
Landon Moore: When all else fails.
Marjorie Furay: Can't turn it off and turn it back on.
Andrew Pitmon: So you want me to just God with my presentation?
Marjorie Furay: Yes, it sound good, Nicholas.
Marjorie Furay: I don't know if he's already doing it.
Andrew Pitmon: I don't think he's any right now.
Marjorie Furay: OK.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah, go ahead, you, Andrew, and then we'll start him up once, once he gets back in.
Andrew Pitmon: Alright, one second.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah.
Marjorie Furay: Not yet.
Bradley Marker: No.
Tiffany Davidson: Not at the moment.
Tiffany Davidson: There it is.
Marjorie Furay: Yep.
Andrew Pitmon: OK, cool.
Andrew Pitmon: Oh, all right.
Andrew Pitmon: So my name is Andrew Pittman and my presentation is going to be on Homelands, Home labs and what are they to me?
Andrew Pitmon: And it's simplest terms.
Andrew Pitmon: A homelab is an environment sandbox that you can build, play and learn technologies with without the fear of consequences of breaking things.
Andrew Pitmon: A homelab is a place that you can experiment safely outside of your normal environment or your work environment.
Andrew Pitmon: You can use a homelab for personal projects, self learning growth or even as a personal hobby for fun.
Andrew Pitmon: Homeo abuses.
Andrew Pitmon: You can use a homelab for self hosting network services such as firewalls and storage servers, game servers, web servers, media servers, infrastructure services with virtualization and containerization, security tools and so much more.
Andrew Pitmon: I mean, the possibilities are just about endless.
Andrew Pitmon: Home labs can make great environments to help study for a certification, or even to set up a mock enterprise environment, much like your work environment, so that you can test changes and develop your skills with the architecture and services without the worry of bringing down the organizational network or being embarrassed by a mistake.
Andrew Pitmon: As far as home labs go, they can be as simple as an old computer or laptop, a low powered Raspberry Pi or similar micro computer device to even a fully clustered server architecture, complete with storage and network services.
Andrew Pitmon: A homelab can literally be as simple or as complex as you want it to be, and that's the benefit.
Andrew Pitmon: Start with whatever you have or can get your hands on and build up from there.
Andrew Pitmon: It's even possible nowadays to build out a homelab environment fully in the cloud with great options such as Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS, Azure and many others.
Andrew Pitmon: All the above will help you to consider the requirements and size of your home lab needs and where you want to start.
Andrew Pitmon: What is your goal prior to starting your homelab, it can be beneficial to consider what are your overall goals that you want to achieve by setting one up.
Andrew Pitmon: What is it you want to do?
Andrew Pitmon: What do you want to accomplish?
Andrew Pitmon: What do you wanna learn?
Andrew Pitmon: Will you architecture run 24/7 or will it only run on demand?
Andrew Pitmon: How many users will you have?
Andrew Pitmon: How deep in the network services will you go?
Andrew Pitmon: Will you have a DHCP server?
Andrew Pitmon: DNS servers and sinkholes, reverse proxies, certificates and domains and fully qualified domain names.
Andrew Pitmon: Publicly hosted servers within a DMZ, services within a DMZ network attached storage, media servers, game servers.
Andrew Pitmon: I mean the possibilities are endless.
Andrew Pitmon: What you can do with the home web?
Andrew Pitmon: The benefits of a home lab?
Andrew Pitmon: A homelab will allow you to build upon skills and a theoretical knowledge that we have all been learning throughout school and college that can also help you by deploying various projects and mock enterprise type networks to help bolster your resume and help you land your dream IT job.
Andrew Pitmon: They also help you learn, develop skills and a sector of it outside of your major.
Andrew Pitmon: A homelab gives the capability to build skills and networking, security, DevOps, infrastructure and virtualization coding, web hosting, databases, automation, and countless others.
Andrew Pitmon: Having experience with so many different aspects of IT will help alleviate the feelings of imposter syndrome and even help develop your confidence in your own abilities and with your IT skills.
Andrew Pitmon: By making you more well rounded and not one dimensional individual.
Andrew Pitmon: On the topic of home my resources, there are many websites, forums, blogs available to help you.
Andrew Pitmon: Every step of the way and to learn new ideas for what to work on and build next.
Andrew Pitmon: Literally any project that you can come up with, you can type it in on Google, go to YouTube, search around on GitHub.
Andrew Pitmon: I mean, there's countless resources out there guides.
Andrew Pitmon: Documentation to help you build upon whatever you want to use.
Andrew Pitmon: Some of my favorite online blogs and resources are the Homelab wiki, various GitHub repositories.
Andrew Pitmon: Reddit is a great option.
Andrew Pitmon: There's two subreddits that I use a lot for homelab and self hosted.
Andrew Pitmon: Where not only do I get ideas and inspiration from seeing other people's home labs and projects, but it also gives me a place when I run into a weird niche problem.
Andrew Pitmon: Problem my homelab and you type it on Google and there's not really much results besides maybe a GitHub pull request that hasn't been answered in like 3 years.
Andrew Pitmon: So it's a great place to post your questions and I honestly been banging my head multiple times getting a certain part of my environment set up or struggling with this and I posted something on there and I actually was able to solve it with the help of the community pie.
Andrew Pitmon: My life up is another good one.
Andrew Pitmon: Docker hub and many many more YouTube is a fantastic resource.
Andrew Pitmon: I'm not gonna go through all those, but those are just some of my more favorite YouTube channels that I've used over the last couple years since I've begun my home Labbing journey.
Andrew Pitmon: And then obviously utilizing various blogs, post Google searches to find great articles, guides, and resources on various sites and GitHub compositores.
Andrew Pitmon: So now getting started with home labs.
Andrew Pitmon: What's the easiest and like the best free way to start?
Andrew Pitmon: The easiest way to start a homelab is to utilize the machine that you are on right now and the form of virtualization.
Andrew Pitmon: Virtualization will allow you to build out complex virtualized networks with Linux and Windows guests and servers networked VMS, and you can even run a ton of containerized services by utilizing Docker desktop within your regular operating system.
Andrew Pitmon: Docker desktop for anybody who's interested in learning dockers, is super easy way to spin out containers and you download it onto like an app onto your machine, just like we do teams or the time clock wizard.
Andrew Pitmon: It's a great way without really needing to understand how to run the commands from the command line, get all that stuff set up and very easily grab images from Docker Hub or Linux server IO and being able to spin them up and run them directly on your local host.
Andrew Pitmon: The best part about this is being able to freely spin up and spin down the infrastructure as needed, and even being able to take snapshots throughout your developments and the event you break something or have an oopsies during deployment configuration.
Andrew Pitmon: Trust me, when you first learning stuff, you're gonna miss configure or set something up wrong or make an error.
Andrew Pitmon: So snapshots are a great way if you don't have backups and everything going.
Andrew Pitmon: Virtualization also gives you the benefit to evaluate exactly what you need to get started or what you actually want to accomplish, and then once you have decided you have outgrown simple local host virtualization, you can begin to buy equipment.
Andrew Pitmon: An alternative easiest star is utilizing the cloud to develop and host your machines.
Andrew Pitmon: Akamai, Linode for example, offers virtual private servers that can be as cheap as $5 per month for a shared CPU VPS, and with this I've tested it myself.
Andrew Pitmon: I've run anywhere from 5 to 15 various Docker containers without needing another server.
Andrew Pitmon: I've used utilized Linode a lot when I was starting because you can easily spend these up and the hourly mark on itself.
Andrew Pitmon: I mean it's fractions of a penny per hour.
Andrew Pitmon: So I mean, if you spend something up for six hours and play around with it, I mean, it literally costs you nothing and a lot of those Youtubers I had in the resources, they often have advertisements with Lennon and I actually signed up twice with two different email accounts where I got $100 in credit for 60 days.
Andrew Pitmon: So I was able to play around with Linode and spin up architecture just like you would with AWS or Azure or something else and just kind of like play around with different systems and spend them down and cost me literally nothing.
Andrew Pitmon: Another benefit of utilizing the cloud is that it also gives you access to firewalls, networking, storage networks, backup and recovery, and even load balancers you can implement within your cloud infrastructure and a home web.
Andrew Pitmon: Additional freeways to get started is by utilizing any old computer or laptop you have lying around.
Andrew Pitmon: A server is not defined by the hardware, but rather by the role of the computer and by definition, a server is literally just a computer that provides services or resources to other computers.
Andrew Pitmon: Even with older, weaker computers, you'd be surprised by the compute power you can get from machine with four less cores as little as 4 to 8 gigs of RAM and some storage.
Andrew Pitmon: Most older computers can run some pretty extensive workloads, and you'd be surprised what you can find online that people are selling for cheap or even throwing away because it's not the fanciest new tech out there.
Andrew Pitmon: My personal homelab begin with two old laptops that had the minimum specs out there, and I was able to deploy a lot.
Andrew Pitmon: Next, I was able to get my hands on some old computers and my job was throwing away.
Andrew Pitmon: More specifically, an HP Elite desk and Dell Optiplex.
Andrew Pitmon: Both of them are like had I54 cores.
Andrew Pitmon: I think they just came like 8 gigs of RAM and mean it was super Basic but they were they taught me a lot and I was able to throw type 1 hypervisor on one, specifically proxmox and then on another one.
Andrew Pitmon: I did bare metal Ubuntu and was able to develop a lot of Linux skills with that.
Andrew Pitmon: So I mean anything that you can get your hands on, so many old computers, people just throw away or get rid of stuff and they make fantastic servers.
Andrew Pitmon: You could take this old hardware and just like I was saying install Linux or Ubuntu bare metal on the infrastructure to learn develop Linux skills.
Andrew Pitmon: You can also install a Windows Server for free to learn about architecture, file sharing and Active Directory among others, and then you can install a free Type 1 hypervisors, such as my favorite is proc box.
Andrew Pitmon: Other good options X P&G TRUENESS and VMware Esxi that will further allow you to deploy various virtual machines on the server and get experience working with firewalls, networking, storage, backups, clustering and more.
Andrew Pitmon: You can even deploy virtualized firewalls such as PF sense, which is what I use or opensense.
Andrew Pitmon: That will allow you to learn networking skills and security skills, including aliases, Vlans, load balancing, VPNs, DHCP management and more to not rule out old computers, they are by hands down the best way to get started with the home lab.
Andrew Pitmon: Another option is upgrading and current computer or using micro computers such as a Raspberry Pi or alternative.
Andrew Pitmon: Unfortunately, when I got started with my homelab journey three years ago, Raspberry pies were $35.
Andrew Pitmon: I haven't looked lately, but I remember like a year ago seeing them like 150 two $100 because of the semiconductor shortages we went through after COVID.
Andrew Pitmon: So they might.
Andrew Pitmon: There is all other alternatives.
Andrew Pitmon: I mainly referenced the Raspberry Pi because it's what I was able to get started with, but even just upgrading the hardware inside of your gaming PC for daily PC, you can have plenty of benefits.
Andrew Pitmon: That was another option that I upgraded to.
Andrew Pitmon: Once I didn't have the laptops or the Raspberry Pi, I took my regular old desktop computer that I used to play video games on, upgraded the RAM in there and got VMware Workstation Pro and was able to spin up a lot of architecture and do exactly what I was talking about in the previous slide.
Andrew Pitmon: The benefits of this is for one, you get to upgrade the machine you use most daily and you get a dedicated computer for homelab and virtualization learning, which is a really good value if you are teetering on the fence about building a homelab or buying other computers to convert into servers and Raspberry Pi or other micro computers.
Andrew Pitmon: A fantastic way to get started.
Andrew Pitmon: You'd be surprised by the hundreds of projects.
Andrew Pitmon: You can use a Raspberry Pi or alternative micro computer for with projects ranging from retro game servers to portable routers and access points to VPNs, to network storage.
Andrew Pitmon: On top of being relatively affordable in micro, computer also utilizes a lower power draw in comparison to a earlier computer, making them a fantastic, fantastically cheap way to get started with the whole lab.
Andrew Pitmon: Another good option is small form factor PCs.
Andrew Pitmon: You can usually find them great deals.
Andrew Pitmon: Craigslist.
Andrew Pitmon: EBay, there's just kind of Google around and they make very good.
Andrew Pitmon: Servers that with the very small power draw, because that's something that you always want to be cautious of once you keep spinning up all this infrastructure and you buy, you know, fully retired enterprise grade servers.
Andrew Pitmon: I mean, there can be no noisy with fan power, and they're gonna have a lot of power draw.
Andrew Pitmon: So those are another good consideration.
Andrew Pitmon: Umm, the next level of home labs to step up is now moving on from the cheap and affordable options of a homelab.
Andrew Pitmon: We have a dedicated server and even enterprise level equipment.
Andrew Pitmon: This can include infrastructure that is rack mounted and complete with the implementation of other physical network infrastructure such as rack mounted managed switches, routers, access points, uninterruptible power supplies, and more.
Andrew Pitmon: There are multiple options at this step.
Andrew Pitmon: For starters, this server can be consumer grade hardware that is converted into a server by upgrading components and putting it into a rack mounting case that will allow you to mount them just like any regular server network equipment.
Andrew Pitmon: This is a great option if you were wanting to rack mount your old computer or upgrade a computer to fit in with the rest of your network and environment equipment.
Andrew Pitmon: This is how the current rendition of my homelab is set up.
Andrew Pitmon: Rather than buying an enterprise grade server that has a ridiculous power draw and noise considerations, I have a clustered together 3 rack and self mounted Dell optiplex small form factor Fifty 50s and upgraded them to 32 gigs of RAM and added multiple SSD's instead of a raid 5 configuration.
Andrew Pitmon: He also took a fourth to host my border firewall PF sounds at the heart of my network doing it this way.
Andrew Pitmon: I was able to save money, breathe new life into older hardware, and what this style of PC conversion servers they wear fantastic or various types of workloads and have small power draw considerations.
Andrew Pitmon: My network racks it's underneath my desk and I don't even hear these computers run.
Andrew Pitmon: I have 4 computers.
Andrew Pitmon: I will see as we get later on, but just a really great consideration is finding older computers and especially if you can get your hands on something small form factor like a Dell optiplex, they are amazing universities, schools all the time are upgrading from them.
Andrew Pitmon: They're constantly getting rid of them, so if you know somebody from there, it's a great option to reach out and see if you can get one off of them.
Andrew Pitmon: These types of PC servers can be used for obviously game servers, web servers, media servers, Cuba identity networks, Docker virtualization, hypervisors and all.
Andrew Pitmon: These things typically work really great on this type of infrastructure.
Andrew Pitmon: The final boss of the Homelab is now we are getting on to the big boys, the enterprise, the dedicated server architecture that supports air correcting RAM, multiple power supplies, over 100 gigabytes of RAM, 10s of hard drives to implement a Nas or ZFS pools for your homelab environment.
Andrew Pitmon: Once you reach a certain point in your homelab adventure, you'll begin to look out for enterprise grade equipment to take your adventure to the Max.
Andrew Pitmon: When talking about enterprise grade, this is about multiple hard drive bays.
Andrew Pitmon: Hot swappable hard drives.
Andrew Pitmon: Dual and Quad Knicks dual power supplies.
Andrew Pitmon: High processing CPUs in a ton of error correcting RAM and the hundreds of gigs and various other enterprise level features for all of your self hosted needs that will guarantee that your infrastructure and services can always stay running without failure.
Andrew Pitmon: At this level you can run lots of virtual machines each outfit with a ton of resources such as CPUs and RAM and lots of ***** disk space.
Andrew Pitmon: Now, while this level is extreme, you can find lots of great value and deals out there as enterprises are always upgrading their equipment and infrastructure, albeit you do not ever need to get to this level.
Andrew Pitmon: Most home labs I see with a ton of services are built out and run on laptops, old PCs, micro computers, and other similar options.
Andrew Pitmon: Some of my homelab projects inside of my homelab I was able to get experience setting up physical infrastructure with buying a rack, mounting in a Cisco 2960 S 48 port, managed switch rack mounting my optiplex CES wiring in multiple ubiquity unify access points.
Andrew Pitmon: I eventually added a Synology Nas and my Raspberry Pi.
Andrew Pitmon: I ended up adding another Netgear managed switch which is pretty cheap from Best Buy to get my security training grounds internal network from my production network that the rest of my family uses inside of my homelab.
Andrew Pitmon: I was able to gain experience implementing Vlans and ACL physically on my switches command line.
Andrew Pitmon: More specifically, Cisco IOS and inside of my pfsense border firewall within pfsense I was able to learn about DHCP management.
Andrew Pitmon: I even set up multiple VPNs for remote access back into my home network when I'm away, and I also set up a site to site VPN from my physical pfsense box to another virtualized instance of pfsense to securely access the security Internet from a.
Andrew Pitmon: It's a Ubuntu uh VM jump box to play around with malware and real compromise machines safely on a private internal network within my hypervisor choice proxmox.
Andrew Pitmon: I was able to deploy various virtual machines for media servers, local file sharing and network attached storage.
Andrew Pitmon: A DNS server and sync hole for network wide ad blocking a reverse proxy and domain for fully qualified domain names and inside my network without having to use IP addresses to even LinkedIn.
Andrew Pitmon: Clustered networking between my servers with load balancing and failover and if further enabled me to learn about containerization by utilizing I can containers where I can not only save on compute power but also develop new skills.
Andrew Pitmon: I was office.
Andrew Pitmon: I was also able to get experience with Wi-Fi configurations and control through my unified AP access points.
Andrew Pitmon: I also added two APC uninterruptible power supplies that give me the ability to gracefully shut down and keep my network up in the event of a power outage.
Andrew Pitmon: My journey so far with my home labs.
Andrew Pitmon: I started homelab being 3 1/2 years ago when I started down in my college journey because I had always read and learned that it was a great way to develop skills.
Andrew Pitmon: And honestly, I, uh, kind of got tired of only learning theoretical knowledge.
Andrew Pitmon: I feel like for at least for me, it's a lot harder to.
Andrew Pitmon: Uh, keep track of everything that we're learning over the years.
Andrew Pitmon: If you just learn about it, read about it and you become the expert that day.
Andrew Pitmon: But you never actually physically set it up in your own environment.
Andrew Pitmon: I always found it was hard to withhold that information, so this is what helped me begin my journey.
Andrew Pitmon: As I mentioned previously, I started with old cheap laptops and a dummy neck gear switch, which means that it's unmanaged to where I couldn't set up Vlans or anything, just basically plug and play, eventually upgrading to old desktop PC's that were being thrown out to obtaining to obtaining a cheap Cisco Switch from eBay to adding Wi-Fi and control through my unify access points and controller to adding uninterruptible power supply systems to buying a 15 U rack to add it all into to adding an internal secure network for testing to deploying all sorts of containers and services that my family could take advantage of within our home network.
Andrew Pitmon: The joy of homelands is that they could start so simple and continually grow as you get new ideas or projects to implement or infrastructure to add to the network as your needs change and grow, so too will your homelab to mixing and matching parts.
Andrew Pitmon: Pieces, brands.
Andrew Pitmon: Servers, gear racks, networking.
Andrew Pitmon: Literally you name it.
Andrew Pitmon: There is no wrong way to build out a home app, and they are truly, and they truly are.
Andrew Pitmon: In my opinion, the best way to develop IT, skills and all disciplines of it, that's the best thing about homelands is that No2 homelands are the same and it becomes really fun to browse online and see what other people have implemented and with what resources.
Andrew Pitmon: Home labs are truly unique and can be just as unique as the individual setting them up.
Andrew Pitmon: A homelab allows you to do so much in my homelab I'm the security architect.
Andrew Pitmon: I'm the dev OPS engineer.
Andrew Pitmon: I'm the System Administrator.
Andrew Pitmon: I'm the network administrator.
Andrew Pitmon: On the cloud engineer and all this for my own custom and tailored environment that I have full reign on.
Andrew Pitmon: What I want to do and implement without the fear of destroying someone else's environment or you're work environment.
Andrew Pitmon: This presentation is only scratched the surface on what a home lab is.
Andrew Pitmon: How to build one and what you can do with them?
Andrew Pitmon: Literally, the possibilities are endless, and once you build out your own homelab, go ahead and share your experiences online at your job, with your friends, or create a blog.
Andrew Pitmon: A home lab is the best place to get your footing with it, and in this industry, without my own, without my homeland, I would only have the security skills game from my classes and occasional outside learning.
Andrew Pitmon: Now, with my home lab, I have a greater understanding of what different practices and disciplines are within an enterprise and organizational environment that will only help to make me a more well rounded security and IT professional who understands deep down how the different parts work together within the environment.
Andrew Pitmon: This was some of my progress on the top.
Andrew Pitmon: This is when I first got the rack mount to go into.
Andrew Pitmon: Uh, the picture in the top left, you can see the three optiplex is down below.
Andrew Pitmon: I hadn't gotten a third one to do a fully clustered network with failover options.
Andrew Pitmon: One all the way to the left was my pfsense box.
Andrew Pitmon: Above that you could see the two dummy neck your switches and to the right of them was my Raspberry Pi.
Andrew Pitmon: This is when I got those Cisco switches, but at the time I didn't know how to use Cisco IOS command line, nor did I feel confident in my abilities to do that.
Andrew Pitmon: Eventually upgraded as you could see three of them flipped sideways, so that's my proxmox cluster.
Andrew Pitmon: And then the PDF sends border firewall to the left of it.
Andrew Pitmon: I eventually added a Synology DS920 plus outfitted with 16 terabytes of storage and two 500 gigs.
Andrew Pitmon: So one terabyte and total of m.two caching for even faster access to my storage or different containerized services I have running on there, eventually was able to learn Cisco IOS, which was fantastic.
Andrew Pitmon: I'm a big terminal person, so I prefer to work in those instead of a gooey and I I thought it was really great learning environment and then to the right.
Andrew Pitmon: It was just like another angle of that.
Andrew Pitmon: And then there was just like a night time picture of like my setup.
Andrew Pitmon: Just kind of showing my desk you could see with the green lights over on the left hand.
Andrew Pitmon: That's my 15 U rack mount desk on top and then you can see my old gaming PC that I eventually outfit the middle picture in the bottom row.
Andrew Pitmon: It's not the best zoomed in, but you can see I use Velcro.
Andrew Pitmon: Zip ties are a game changer.
Andrew Pitmon: Don't let anybody tell you different if you're gonna get into this path, get some Velcro, zip ties, or, like, a couple bucks on Amazon and you save yourself so many, like headaches of hafting to try to get scissors in and try to clip off normal ties.
Andrew Pitmon: And the benefit of doing your wiring and keeping track of everything is you always know where stuff goes and then event the you have a fail or something messes up or you need to do perform maintenance on part of your servers and stuff.
Andrew Pitmon: I even got a label gun so I was able to.
Andrew Pitmon: You might be able to see some of the white tags on the cables.
Andrew Pitmon: I was able to label exactly where everything went, so if I were to tear apart this whole server and actually this rack and everything, I actually moved a couple weeks ago.
Andrew Pitmon: So I did have to tear all this down and it was super easy to put it all back together cuz everything was already labeled and super easy to go.
Andrew Pitmon: The final picture on the bottom right was just an example of one of my unified access points.
Andrew Pitmon: That one specifically is the unified use 6 Pro.
Andrew Pitmon: Amazing access points.
Andrew Pitmon: I suggest them and then another picture of just some more examples.
Andrew Pitmon: Top left is the dashboard called Heimdall.
Andrew Pitmon: You can add the links to all your different services and infrastructure, whether it be quick links to your hypervisor, to your Raspberry Pi dashboard, to your unified network, to all your various Docker containers and services, wikis, media servers, all that stuff, the picture next to it is an example of pie hole.
Andrew Pitmon: I specifically use adguard.
Andrew Pitmon: I did use pinhole for a little bit, but essentially how that works is that the DNS sinkhole.
Andrew Pitmon: So when you get ads so it has a a list that it goes through and let's say like ads kind of get slipped through as your network and your browsing traffic.
Andrew Pitmon: Most companies and stuff will be able to detect if you're blocking those packets and then argue at you and not allow you to continue without getting rid of your ad blocker.
Andrew Pitmon: The best thing about a DNS sync hole is that it's not actually denying the packets, it's just sending them to a sink hole.
Andrew Pitmon: So from their side it looks like you're getting fed the ads, but really your network's not feeding you the ads because there are meeting the DNS sync.
Andrew Pitmon: Super amazing.
Andrew Pitmon: I recommend an ad blocker to everybody.
Andrew Pitmon: The next picture to the right of that is an example of the Unify controller where you can view your access points, VPNs, controllers.
Andrew Pitmon: They even offer routers, switches, firewalls, all that good jazz.
Andrew Pitmon: The picture to the right of that was when I was performing maintenance on all of them.
Andrew Pitmon: So you can see my 4 Dell optiplex servers there and my old department used to get dusty a lot and I always worried about the health of my computers, so that was just an example of tearing them down, performing maintenance, bottom left pictures and example of proxmox proxmox which is a Type 1 hypervisor which the long list to the left is all the different virtual machines and infrastructure you can run and then that becomes fully equipped with so many different things you could do between networking, storage, firewalls, backups, configurations, failovers, clustering and you name it.
Andrew Pitmon: The next picture is an example of.
Andrew Pitmon: Once you get logging and monitoring all that stuff set up, you can forward your syslogs over to Loki and Grafana, which is that what an example is and get a really deep dive analysis into what is happening on your network and what all your various machines are doing, and then the two pictures to the right were the up some more upgrades I made to my computer on top of these basic computers.
Andrew Pitmon: Some of the main equipment that I upgraded was RAM.
Andrew Pitmon: I added a m.two boot drive for each of them was just like 250 gigs.
Andrew Pitmon: I was able to buy attachments and be able to fit three SSD's in them for and it's running raidz one which is what Proxmox uses, but it's pretty much like using RAID 5 and then obviously upgrading your NICs.
Andrew Pitmon: NICs.
Andrew Pitmon: I originally started with the one on the left, which is a 2 port Nic.
Andrew Pitmon: Huge waste of money because I quickly outgrew them, especially when I wanted failover options and direct connect.
Andrew Pitmon: Network storage is everything backs up to my NASA system and then all my different servers communicate with each other.
Andrew Pitmon: So the example on the right was a four port Intel 1 Gigabit Nic and I love that thing.
Andrew Pitmon: Yeah.
Andrew Pitmon: Other than that, home labs are just a really great way to get started for learning just about anything and developing your skills.
Andrew Pitmon: Anyone have questions?
Jean Velace: This way, one quick question.
Andrew Pitmon: Yeah.
Andrew Pitmon: Go for it.
Jean Velace: Hello this is real quick.
Jean Velace: Was it the Ohh that home that?
Jean Velace: Experience do you put that on your resume?
Andrew Pitmon: All for sure.
Andrew Pitmon: It's a huge talking point.
Andrew Pitmon: I mean, obviously a homelab isn't necessary.
Jean Velace: God.
Andrew Pitmon: You don't have to have a homelab do anything but more times than not, especially have my employer and other various employers and people I've met in the industry and connect to having a home lab to talk about just shows your drive and passion about it and it shows that you're willing to learn and take the steps and actually dive into these tools and you have experience setting them up rather than just watching the video listening to a lecture or reading a textbook because it's it's really a different level of it being able to turn the theoretical knowledge that you gain into actual skills by developing and setting stuff up.
Andrew Pitmon: And that's why I'm a big proponent or fan of setting them up.
Jean Velace: Got it.
Andrew Pitmon: Not necessarily though.
Andrew Pitmon: But yeah, if you ever do man throw that on your resume, shout it to the world, man.
Andrew Pitmon: Everybody loves to learn about home labs.
Andrew Pitmon: It'll only make you look better.
Jean Velace: OK, great.
Jean Velace: Thank you.
Andrew Pitmon: Yeah, no problem.
Andrew Pitmon: Alright, if nobody else has any questions, that was the end of my presentation.
Tiffany Davidson: OK, I don't know.
Tiffany Davidson: Nick did come back at one point.
Tiffany Davidson: I don't know if he's still on here.
Nicholas Wolf: Yeah, I'm still here.
Nicholas Wolf: I can try it again, see if it works.
Tiffany Davidson: Yeah, go ahead and try.
Marjorie Furay: OK.
Marjorie Furay: Yep, go ahead.
Nicholas Wolf: OK.
Marjorie Furay: Excellent job, Andrew, definitely.
Nicholas Wolf: It's not letting me show my screen now.
Nicholas Wolf: Going all types of problems with teams.
Nicholas Wolf: I could try to quickly leave and come back, see if the share options come up.
Marjorie Furay: You're not getting the share options at the top.
Marjorie Furay: Are you coming through the desktop or the web version?
Nicholas Wolf: Desktop.
Nicholas Wolf: Yeah, when I click share it's not showing any of the options.
Marjorie Furay: 2.
Marjorie Furay: I can't think of what would work.
Nicholas Wolf: I don't know.
Nicholas Wolf: I mean, since it's getting so late, I can.
Marjorie Furay: My mother says 25th.
Nicholas Wolf: Uh, yeah, I I guess I could do that.
Nicholas Wolf: Either that or.
Marjorie Furay: Or what you what you could do too is if you want to.
Marjorie Furay: So you could send it and then we could actually play it for you.
Nicholas Wolf: The other thing is, uh, uh, my presentation is in at me.
Nicholas Wolf: It's in unity and uh, Visual Studio.
Nicholas Wolf: It's not really a PowerPoint, so.
Marjorie Furay: So can you can you show that instead of showing teams as much, you can't share anything?
Nicholas Wolf: No, I can't share any the when I click the share button it won't let me click any of the options like the options don't show up.
Marjorie Furay: Strange.
Nicholas Wolf: I can quickly leave and come back.
Nicholas Wolf: Maybe that'll work.
Marjorie Furay: Try it one more time.
Nicholas Wolf: No, still not giving me any options.
Nicholas Wolf: Yes.
Alexander Vance: And Nicholas, are you using the desktop app? OK.
Nicholas Wolf: But yeah, I don't.
Nicholas Wolf: I don't understand why it's giving me so many problems.
Nicholas Wolf: Maybe I have to reinstall teams or something?
Marjorie Furay: Right, yeah.
Nicholas Wolf: Yeah, I can either move my presentation to next week or I can just make a recording and send it in to you.
Nicholas Wolf: Either way, it's fine.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah, do that.
Marjorie Furay: Send recording and and yeah, record it and then send it in.
Marjorie Furay: We'll try that way too.
Nicholas Wolf: OK, alright, sorry about that.
Nicholas Wolf: I don't know why I'm having so many problems.
Marjorie Furay: No problem, it happens.
Marjorie Furay: You know, computers are computers.
Marjorie Furay: That's IT.
Nicholas Wolf: Yep.
Marjorie Furay: Alright, everybody.
Marjorie Furay: Well, everybody, you did a great job.
Marjorie Furay: Absolutely.
Marjorie Furay: Thank you for all that you have done.
Marjorie Furay: Excellent, excellent presentations and umm, does anybody have any questions for anybody that presented this evening?
Marjorie Furay: OK.
Marjorie Furay: Well, then we will say goodnight to everybody and thank you for coming.
Marjorie Furay: Thank you for presenting.
Tiffany Davidson: Thank you.
Antoniette Zaker: Thank you.
Jean Velace: Thank you.
Jean Velace: Have a good night everyone.