Packetfence 4.0.1 - First load

As the summer window of working on projects before the day students return is rapidly shrinking, I needed to start on my Packetfence upgrade. If you read my blog before you may know I am a pretty big user of it.

As I wrote back in May it is a fresh install, no direct upgrade path. Getting started, I loaded up a vm with CentOS 6.4 and started down the PacketFence Admin Guide to install. The install guide is fairly straightforward to follow. There is a section on install which on RHEL/CentOS system you have to add additional repos to get things going.

Great been here, not sure I remember the last one from the last install. Ok no big deal, right? I hit a small roadblock with this one. There is only 1 copy of that repo, and it was down. Argh!

Read some more into the doc:

 Debian and Ubuntu
All the PacketFence dependencies are available through the official repositories.

Ok scrap the CentOS 6 install, load up Debian and lets rock. Everything went smooth after that.

PacketFence install within 15 minutes of Debian system being up.

Initial Impressions:

Web Configurator: Awesome to help get things setup.
New Admin Portal: Awesome, leaps and bounds better than 3.5x, the amount you can change inside the interface is great.  I was editing the AUP_Text and save and refreshing the captive portal with the changes live. (Couldn't do that before.)

System performance: Not in production yet so can't say.

The interface is snappy. The search is great with the ease that you can add on more rules to search for to narrow down the person/node that you are looking for.

Guest management is just what I was looking for.

This is NAC that Excites. Hats off to the Inverse.ca team for this work.

Certification - Where do I start from?

So I have been working in IT since 1996, did mostly PC work until 2000 when I started doing this network thing... We had all this Cisco gear, and I wanted to go get my Cisco certs. But it was clear that they were not going to help in my current employment (Financially). Put it on the back burner, kids came along, further back.... Less and less Cisco gear, some staleness in learning on my part, also additional responsibilities. Finally decided to get my Masters degree (price was right, working in EDU does have some perks).

Now after starting this blog, using twitter, connecting with others in the industry, I have decided that maybe it is time to move ahead with a certification. My goal is not too accumulate certs for the sake of doing so. It really is about learning and growing.

Daily tasks cover lots of topics not just networking. Server Admin, Telecom, Networking, PC, Database, Security, etc. The "All other duties as assigned" part of the job description fits quite well. This happens when working in a department of IT department of 7, err maybe 8 now.

On my goals in my review this year I put down obtain one certification. The $64,000 question is which one?
That is what I am asking, I would appreciate some feedback as to options?  Cisco, HP, Security related. Just looking for a place to start with, and the value of it.

So please leave a comment, send me a idea on twitter.

Thanks