Firewall & Network Edge
WAN/LAN segmentation, NAT, and pfSense rule design for the lab edge.
Debug focus: interface assignment and host-only adapter behavior
Google-certified and self-directed. I build and document IT environments across networking, identity, support, mail, and security monitoring, then test them against real failures so the work shows not just what exists, but how it behaves when things break.
Infrastructure, support workflows, and security monitoring presented as independent work areas, not a single showcase.
Root-cause debugging, verbose log analysis, and honest documentation of what failed, what changed, and why.
A practical systems portfolio that reads like a real technical profile instead of a one-project landing page.
Comprehensive training covering computer networking, operating systems (Windows & Linux), system administration, troubleshooting methodology, and customer service in IT environments.
I hold the Google IT Support Professional Certificate and built HelpDeskLab to go beyond scripted tutorials: seven services that actually depend on each other, on one network, producing the kind of subtle, multi-layered failures a real environment produces — not a clean happy-path walkthrough.
Every module is documented with real screenshots, configuration detail, and an honest account of what broke and how I diagnosed it. That diagnostic process, more than any single service, is the point of the project.
These are the individual systems and service layers that make up the broader HelpDeskLab environment.
WAN/LAN segmentation, NAT, and pfSense rule design for the lab edge.
Windows Server identity core with OUs, GPOs, DNS, DHCP, and permissions testing.
Failover testing that keeps the domain alive when DC01 is offline.
Shares, FSRM quotas, and a printer rollout managed through Group Policy.
A helpdesk stack that covers the full ticket lifecycle on a Linux web stack.
Postfix, Dovecot, and Roundcube delivering mail across Linux services.
Azure Arc hybrid onboarding, Log Analytics, and KQL detections for visibility.
The full lab still ties everything together: VirtualBox-hosted infrastructure, pfSense at the edge, two domain controllers, file and print services, osTicket, mail, and Sentinel monitoring. The difference is that the page now presents those systems as separate portfolio entries first, so the site reads like a broader technical profile rather than one oversized project page.
Renaming a domain controller mid-project (DC1 → DC01)
cascaded into six independent, hard-to-connect failures: a Kerberos error
that was actually about stale DNS, a DHCP authorization failure, a loopback
self-authentication quirk, a stale AD computer object, a DHCP scope missing
failover DNS options, and a GPO that accidentally locked out the DCs
themselves. Each layer needed its own diagnosis — fixing one didn't fix
the next.
Roundcube threw an internal error loading the inbox, even though Postfix
logs confirmed every message was delivered. Permission and package fixes
made partial progress but never solved it. Reading Dovecot's own verbose
debug trace (doveadm -Dv force-resync) revealed a
mail_inbox_path override in 10-mail.conf silently
pointing IMAP at an empty directory — a completely different location
than where mail was actually landing. Every symptom pointed to a
plausible-but-wrong cause; only the debug log revealed the real one.
Two originally-planned modules — VLAN segmentation and scripted endpoint hardening — were deliberately descoped due to time, in favor of finishing the seven services above to a high standard rather than spreading thinner across nine.