Rob Gauthier's Digital Portfolio

For my final reflection pieces on my time at NSCC, I have decided to divide them by project, instead of by course. Project Mythic was an extensive undertaking that even the project management team was not sure we would achieve. I am happy to say that in the end, we definitely found success. The project concept was to build an on-premise virtual solution in the form of a cohesive ESXi and Hyper-V virtual environment, with SAN connectivity, and link that to an Azure cloud solution running its own AD and Office 365. Essentially, the design and implementation of a functioning hybrid cloud deployment. I played the role of Junior Project Manager for the SAN deployment team, using FreeNAS as our deployment tool. Keeping teams organized and on-point for a project of this size can be challenging, especially when each student is trying to learn each piece of the bigger project while deploying their part of the solution at the same time! Everyone pulled through, though, and today we connected the first of the boxes to the SAN units through iSCSI. A fantastic result for my team, which I couldn't be happier about.

Almost none of the class had worked with most of technologies we explored throughout the project, and I feel that for those students who remained invested throughout, we all learned a great deal about virtualization and the cloud environment. Catherine Stokes, the instructor, proved to be a great leader for achieving our results, and empowered each Junior Project manager to plan, create task lists, brainstorm solutions to problems, and develop leadership skills that will serve all of us for years to come. The entire experience was excellent as a whole and I would happily take on a project like it again.

I entered this introductory programming class with a fair bit of knowledge in programming already. I had previous education in Java, C+, C++, and had used VB.net extensively in my previous courses. This means that I had a more solid idea of the work going in. At first, I was apprehensive because I had not programmed in a few years but it turns out that doing this is like riding a bike.

Within the first couple of weeks we were given projects to complete that included writing simple calculations, decision structures and user validations checks. All of these subjects have been great refresher for skills that had been on the wane for the past few years. Throughout this class, we began working on the very simple subjects and expanded to the final project, which was a much more complex endeavour. For this final project, we had to develop a functional real-world application (for mine I chose a phone book) that was comprised of multiple forms, wrote to and read from a file using arrays for temporary data storage and had full user validation in every aspect. It was challenging, engrossing and a lot of fun!

I can honestly say that working through PROG1100 has re-ignited my excitement for the subject and I am looking forward to continuing to develop my app dev skills even though I am taking the SM/N stream. Wesley Howie has been an excellent instructor with a true enthusiasm for the subject and I look forward to future projects.

When I began this class, I possessed a real desire to learn the intricacies of networking. I think I can confidently say now that I have. I always had an interest in the subject and had limited experience setting up small networks for businesses or homes but had never really learned the theory behind it. In every case I was able to more or less let the hardware do the bulk of the work without really understanding what was happening under the hood. Since I began working through the many chapters for CCNA certification, I can honestly say that this fact has changed drastically. Chris Mogensen has instilled each of us with a genuine excitement for this very difficult subject and I enjoy his teaching a great deal.

Upon completing this class (which I achieved a mark of 100% in) I feel without a doubt that I have a firm grasp on both the CCNA theory and practical applications of networks. I have learned a great deal about the ISO model, TCP/IP's connection to it and the logical vs. physical topologies. We have worked extensively with Packet Tracer, Wireshark, setting up Web and FTP servers, Remote Desktop Support and touched on Wi-Fi and WAN networks (both of which we will be covering much more extensively in the future). For our final practical portion of the class, we were required to set up a logical, simple LAN using CLI to program each of the routers/switches (any GUI support was disabled).

This was a truly engrossing subject that I enjoyed every moment of, which is why I am choosing to continue on with this as my focus for the remainder of the course!

Like programming, I had already been designing and implementing databases for some time and received formal training previously as well. We have already completed several assignments in this course and I would say that I have re-learned a great deal about Access, which I hadn't used in some time. I had been using SQL and MySQL (for web) for my databases, foregoing Access entirely but I can honestly say that I now see its merits.

Through our work, we have practiced what is involved in building a database, relationships and error checking, structure checking such as data format and length, and generating user input and output through forms and reports. We have also delved further into the subject of forms and reports to study making professional-looking formats. Mike Crocker is an excellent instructor with a true passion for what he does. He understands how important databases are to all aspects of IT and has reinforced this with his students.

As our final weeks of the class approached, we focused much of our attention on building relevant and professional ERDs to pre-plan our databases accordingly. This was a subject that I had not yet covered using any type of software, so learning to use Visio was an excellent experience. We then delved into our final project, which was to develop the database back-end of an events-planning company, including the initial ERD planning and a fully-featured professional database. This included several entities, forms, reports, and queries, along with a sleek navigation form to tie it all together. I was very pleased with the way it turned out; a lot of work, but well worth it. We even had to dive into some SQL code to pull together one or two of the queries, which was a nice treat.

Web Development has been quite different from all of my other classes. My first and biggest challenge was to switch from the in-class to the on-line class. I needed to do this for family scheduling reasons. Once this was done, I realized that an RPL would probably be most appropriate because I actually obtained my first post-secondary diploma in Web Development so taking this course of action just made sense. I was not, however, very familiar with HTML5 and CSS3, having used previous versions in my other training. This was also the class in which we were assigned starting our digital portfolio. For these reasons, I was not able to completely challenge out.

I completed all of the assignments quite easily since it was just a matter of following along with the text and developed my digital portfolio in order to complete the class. With everything in place for my digital portfolio (obviously, since you're reading it now), I will continue to update and expand upon it going forward until I have completed my course at NSCC in full!

Tech Comm has possibly been my most challenging class this term. Marc Scarfone is an excellent instructor who is not afraid to bolster your confidence, or correct it if needed. The main reason the class has been so challenging is the fact that there is so much involved that I have never touched on before. We have been writing papers and reports, doing presentations and a lot of discussions. I have never experienced a class like this one before. I did not attend university and sit through courses that were heavy on lectures or writing papers and presentations. That being said, I am making it work. We recently completed and handed in our resume assignment and I will soon be presenting for the first time and complete the short report. These three assignments alone will account for 75% of our mark, so a lot rides on doing them well.

I wanted to leave that first paragraph untouched. I wrote it in a different time and place, mentally, and wanted to reflect back on not only the class, but what I wrote. I achieved a 99% in this class. I doubted my work at every step, because I had lost confidence in skills that I felt I didn't truly possess anymore. I couldn't have been more wrong, and Marc recognized that about me. I know this now. In dealing with my anxieties over presenting and having not really reformed my resume in quite some time, I felt that I wasn't ready for these topics as fully as I once had been. The short report turned out to be great, and I based it off of the presentation that I put together. The two cover the topic of setting up an NSCC Exchange account on your phone, presenting the steps necessary and illustrating the true benefits to the end user. Marc liked them enough to ask me for them to pass along to future students, which was a great boost to my confidence to be sure!

Tech Comm actually taught me to stop doubting myself so much. Not that I intend to ever treat my work like a joke, because I never would. I might not pass in as many pieces of work expecting failure, though.

Technical Foundations has been an important class to complete, even though it is considered trivial by a lot of the students. This class covers common practices in the IT industry and computer management in general, like partitioning of hard drives and file system structures and thus far I have been doing very well. I have been using computers and practicing with multiple OS's since I was 13 so I have a great deal of experience with the subjects we have been covering.

We did have to write an abstract as our first pass-in assignment and I have to say this one caught me off-guard. In fact, I think it caught the entire class and taught all of us an important lesson. We did not pay close enough attention to the rubric (in fact, I did not realize there was one at all) and because of this, we all received marks well below what we might have because we were all missing entire sections of the work. I have taken this important lesson away and will always follow the rubric if available from now on.

Throughout the class, we covered Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio, VBA (for automation with Office) and several other topics, like those listed above. It was a wealth of information that will prove to be very useful going forward, if for nothing else other than speed of doing work! As our final project, we did a presentation using Powerpoint, for which I covered Enterprise Server Virtualization. Doing the presentation was a great experience because I was able to dive into, and research a topic that I personally find very intriguing (and would love to work with!)

Computer hardware skills are essential for any IT professional to possess and as such, I am glad that we had a comprehensive hardware component to our program. Todd Verge was an excellent instructor; very knowledgeable and professional and always available with a word of encouragement when a student was left scratching their head. During the course, we covered many hardware related topics, from an introduction to the inside of a computer and its components, to troubleshooting multiple hardware issues (which requires a knowledge base to accomplish).

We stared by taking a look at all of the motherboard components and exploring in a general sense “inside the box”. During this section, we learned many fundamental concepts, from the chipset to the north and south bridge, onboard components vs. expansion components and the meanings of several of the more common acronyms like PCI, RAM, ROM, BIOS, CMOS and more. Next, we took a look at operating systems (mainly Windows 7 and XP), which drew many parallels to our OSYS 1200 class where we were studying Windows 7 Administration. After this, we dove into a lot more detail on various computer hardware components, taking a much closer look at the workings of the motherboard, CPU, memory of various kinds, HDDs, I/O devices, and multimedia devices (optical, sound, and video).

We wrapped the course up by looking at the mechanics and processes involved with notebook computers and printers, both servicing and troubleshooting. I especially enjoyed the troubleshooting portions of the course as I feel that a great deal of my professional time in IT will likely be spent solving these sorts of issues. Overall, the entire course was very relevant and appreciated.

Unix/Linux administration may have been the singular course I excelled the most in and the one I feel I learned the most from during my time with the college thus far. Was reunited with Michael Crocker once again; an instructor whom I genuinely enjoy learning from. I had several advantages at my disposal going into this course. One was that I already had familiarity with Linux (I had previous experience with Red Hat) and another was that I was already fairly comfortable with scripting and scripting environments such as VI and EMACS. Leaving this course, however, I can easily say that I have regained a great deal of confidence with building scripts that I had lost through a few years of not using these skills and I have become far more familiar with many flavors of Linux on the market. This is because during the semester, I had the opportunity to work with OpenSuse, FreeBSD and Ubuntu 13. Therefore I was exposed to a core Linux build, a UNIX build one might find in a server environment, and a Debian build that is very popular for the desktop computer user.

We worked with VMs in VMware for the all of our work, which allowed me to become quite comfortable working with the VMware Workstation framework as well. We began by simple learning the installation process for our two main builds early on and progressed through higher and higher tier concepts as the course progressed. For our end project, we were required to attempt a build completely on our own, with specialized partitioning and setup as well as an executable script to be used on said machine that covered all of the basic management script concepts we had covered to date. I really enjoyed every aspect of this course. I had a great deal of fun learning all of the concepts and re-exploring some that I had forgotten I enjoyed.

Windows 7 Administration was one of the two courses this semester that I had with Marie Dutka (the other being my networking course). Marie came to our program never having taught professionally before, having been asked to replace Chris Mogensen when he could not be present for the spring semester. I am happy that she was, because I feel like I have made a new colleague in Marie. In this particular course, we covered several aspects both simple and quite complex.

We began the semester looking at what Windows 7 was, the versions available and some simple aspects of each. We then began to look at all of the different methods for installations (attended, unattended, DVD, distribution share) and progresses into the meat of managing Windows. The next concepts we covered included (but are not limited to) using the system utilities, disk and file system management, user management and permissions, policy editing, security, networking, performance tuning, and deployment strategies.

I enjoyed this course very much. I feel that I learned many new things and added a great many new tools to help me when working in the Windows environment going forward. I am probably most proud of the fact that I accomplished the bonus objective on our midterm, which was to build and unattended installation of a Windows machine that I imaged, using a distribution share that I created. I was one of a handful of students who attempted the objective and out of those, one of a few who accomplished the task (and received full marks).

Systems analysis and design was an intriguing course to take during my time at NSCC. I had never given any thought to this aspect of IT before and was extremely apprehensive approaching the concepts at the outset of the course. When we began, Wes Howie (from whom I had taken programming in first semester, so this made things more comfortable) had us split into teams and immediately dove in to the meat of things. He had us thinking about complex aspects of SAAD from day one and much of the class was left scratching their heads and quite worried.

I come from a background of management and I knew Wes. I had studied under this man before, so I knew him to be reasonable. I respectfully suggested that perhaps we take some time to explore what the aspects of SAAD were as we approached each one so that we might better understand them and produce (for him) a better end product. He agreed, whole-heartedly. From that point on, things went much more smoothly. We were given a case study for a fictional business owned by Wes called Wheel Engineering, a small wheel engineering firm based in Halifax that was looking for expand and update its technology along with that goal. We explored the options available, providing first, a comprehensive company breakdown to help Wes gain a better perspective of where he stood and what it was he was hoping to accomplish. Most importantly, we described how exactly we could help with a SWOT analysis and risk assessment.

We then proceeded to follow the process a consulting company might if they were responding to a request for proposal, providing a breakdown of hardware and software upgrade paths, and a summary of charges for the project. At the end of each section, we stood in front of the class and presented our findings through documentation and an oral report. Wes was extremely pleased with the efforts of the entire class. I feel that working in groups was an excellent idea since it seemed to bring not only group members, but all of us together, working towards a common goal.

Wow. Small network infrastructure was a very in-depth, challenging course for everyone involved. That is my sincere belief. That being said, I have gained even more confidence in myself and my ability to achieve a career goal following this path that I have chosen over my time at NSCC. This course has made me solidified in my decision to pursue Systems Management / Networking as my concentration for second year. Marie Dutka was the instructor and her level of knowledge on the subject (having been the head of Tech Services for the IT campus) is beyond reproach. I definitely learned a great deal from her.

Topics we covered during the run of the course included switch and router configuration through CLI, spanning-trees, LACP, VLANs, trunking, routing with gateways, DHCP and ACLs. Throughout, I can say that I have gained a great deal more confidence and skill working at the CLI of a switch or router. I have been able to grasp each one of the concepts, not only on a level of implementation but what it is and how it works (or is meant to).

Our final project involved troubleshooting a running network (virtually, within Packet Tracer) and was quite involved. We had to take everything we had learned during the semester and apply it to mend a broken network that we did not initially set up. This proved the greatest challenge of all, because it required analysis and application as well as a deep understanding of the concepts. After all, how can one hope to troubleshoot if they don’t understand why something is wrong? I enjoyed this course immensely and am looking forward to next year!

Network Operating Systems (both Linux and Windows) was the first time I had ever worked with Catherine Stokes as an instructor. I learned an awful lot in these two classes because of her style of supplying guidance and whatever resources we needed and then saying “here, go do it”. We were involved with several new concepts in this class, and a few that I already had some experience with. We installed and configured our own working Active Directory environments with full Group Policy Object support, researched and implemented our own batch scripts to automate actions on the server (this was a refresher piece for me), and also worked with the Open Enterprise Services infrastructure on the Linux side using Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

We developed our own naming conventions documents, which I will continue to use in my future work. We also started delving into project management, implementation plans, and worked a great deal establishing a change log practice for our work. I had the chance to act as project lead on two separate projects and I learned that this role seems to be a natural fit for me, which isn’t a complete surprise, given my management experience in the past. All of these were great learning experiences as well. I was able to apply my knowledge from working with the data center for one of the projects with Windows server, through the WSUS service I had implemented for them. I also gained valuable experience about backup solutions by working to implement Amanda Backup on our Linux servers and link it to both Ubuntu and Windows 7 clients to back up and recover their data. I learned so much from these two courses that I will carry forward with me, it’s hard to summarize, but I have appreciated getting the chance to work with Catherine very much.

Once again, I got to work with the incomparable Chris Mogensen. Hierarchical Network Infrastructure was essentially learning to play in the big leagues and realizing that there is so much more to learn to work at the top level of this industry. Network Engineering is an extremely advanced field. In this class, we scratched the surface of that world and possibly went a little deeper. We covered concepts that were not included in the original learning material, and had a fun time doing so.

As Chris explained to us at the outset of the class, these topics are all really about acronyms. We studied Advanced STP (Spanning Tree Protocol), BGP, ACL’s, NAT/PAT, OSPF, RADIUS, RIPv2, QoS, VoIP, and other smaller concepts. I learned some new and interesting facts about routing and DHCP servicing on a multi-VLAN network. Throughout learning all of these concepts, we learned how they tie together to form a cohesive hierarchical network design and built our own hierarchical network up piece by piece. We reinforced already practiced concepts in each new piece, which helped to solidify them in our minds as we studied the new materials as well. One of the most interesting pieces we did was setting up a small VoIP service. We had to employ concepts we learned in previous exercises, ensure solid QoS and of course, connect the devices to have the service running. I learned that on a small scale, the process is quite simple and it was fun to do. I very much enjoyed this course and having Chris as an instructor again and look forward to Information Security next semester as well!

Course Reflections