Introduction

My name is Jacob “Spudguy” Woodfield, I hold two certifications in CISCO, a Diploma for IT Practitioners and I'm less than 12 months away from a Bachelors of Science in Ethical Hacking and Network Security. Lately, I've had several interviews for jobs and none of them have been successful. The reason? Lack of experience. Although I've been living my life in front of a computer screen since I was 10, I've never really left my comfort zone. I've been sticking with Windows, ignoring Linux and avoiding any and all programming languages as best I can.

So to remedy this situation, I've decided to create a blog with plans to evolve it into a website with skills I pick up from completing various tasks submitted to me by friends, readers and peers. I plan to be handed tasks, or objectives and then carry them out alongside creating a tutorial guide to both showcase my work and also to provide advice and assistance to people looking for it. As someone who is a novice with the areas I hope to explore. I personally find step-by-step tutorials to be invaluable; so it will be great to be able to throw something back out into the community.

Whilst working on these tasks and projects, I will be using a Virtual Machine. There are pretty much two choices I have for this: VMWare Player and VirtualBox. I've decided to go for VMWare Player over VirtualBox for no reason other than the fact that I've used it before and I'm familiar with how it works. I've chosen virtualisation over using a partition of my desktop/laptop hard drives as it's safer, faster to set up and easier to manage. If I want to keep a project around after completion so that I can build on it later, I don't need to create yet another partition for my hard drive, I can simply create another VM.

The computer on which these tasks will be completed:

Operation System: Windows 8 Professional (x64)

Storage: 6TB

RAM: 8GB

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1060T (x64)

GPU: Nvidia 590ti

Currently I'm working on creating a RADIUS Server with WPA-PSK-Enterprise WAP authentication, tasked to me by a coursemate, I'm hoping to soon migrate this blog to my rented server and purchase a domain name for it, so setting up a rented server and hosting a website on it will be one of the (hopefully many) upcoming tutorials posted.

My first project is currently underway and will be posted as soon as I've finished the tutorial. If you have any suggestions for further projects, please post them (along with any feedback and ideas) in the comments section of this blog.

Thanks for reading,

Spudguy