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Name: Daniel Cummins
Certifications: CTT+, CEH, CASP, CND, CCNA, Security+, CIPP/US, COBIT5 Foundations, Network+, A+
Courses I teach: Networking and cybersecurity, along with CompTIA and EC-Council exam prep classes.
What I love about teaching: There’s a moment, and every teacher, instructor and professor has had it, when you are teaching a challenging topic, and you look out and see in their faces that they are getting it…that’s why I teach. I work for that “Aha!” moment, when the lightbulb turns on and that individual has learned something new.
Most rewarding teaching moment: I have had many rewarding moments in my teaching career. But one recent event comes to mind. I forget what the topic was, actually, but I’ll never forget the moment. I had just finished a particularly tough topic and asked if there were any questions. One student responded and said, “I have heard that explained many times, but this is the first time I think I actually understand it.” I couldn’t help but smile and say thank you. That is the best compliment any instructor could ever get.
What I’ve “nerded-out” on recently:
Used my background in networking to design my dream home network.
I spend so much time telling others how to design a network, how to troubleshoot a network, and how to secure a network. As an instructor, I’ve spent a lot of my career in theory and classroom discussions. In 2016, my wife and I made the decision to build a new home rather than purchase one already on the market. This was my chance! Finally, I’m going to get the home network I’ve always dreamed of! Finally, I get to put into practice what I teach every day! I was giddy with excitement!
Now, I had some very important requirements that had to be met so I couldn’t take this process lightly. But I also had a budget – I’m not a Rockefeller, after all. I teach live virtual training sessions out of my home, so I had to have speed and reliability. We also were moving to all-streaming entertainment, which would require a lot of bandwidth. My children are all homeschooled, which is primarily done online, and we have several smartphones, tablets and computers involved in our daily lives. So capacity needed to be addressed as well. I also wanted Wi-Fi (obviously), but with three floors, I knew signal attenuation would be an issue. So I needed to be able to support multiple access points.
I got lucky on one very important component of a home network: the ISP. Since we were a new build, AT&T was offering excellent rates on their newly installed Fiber-to-the-Home service with full gigabit speeds. That one was a no-brainer. But that wasn’t enough. I knew I had to make the inside match the outside. As we discussed the floor plans and designs, I worked with a team of cable installers to put Cat6 Ethernet throughout my home. I arranged and paid for a data port on each floor and installed a switch and wireless access point at each location. Wireless was 802.11ac, of course.
I hooked up my office equipment to a physical switch for maximum reliability and speed. I hooked up all of my TVs (one per floor) to the switch, as well, for maximum bandwidth. I arranged the homeschool room with all of the laptops and desktops in close proximity to the wireless access point. I even threw in a couple of wireless printers on a couple of floors for easy access to both my office and the homeschool room.
For security, I installed the Norton Core secure router at my demarc, which also served as the main WAP. I created content filtering rules at the network core level to ensure safe browsing for my children no matter what device they were using. I set up quality of service for my televisions to ensure preferred bandwidth for all of our streaming. I set up our wireless with a 20+ character password and changed all of the default settings on all of my access points. I configured a separate guest SSID with a separate strong password and posted the guest credentials in a visible place for my friends and family to use.
It took some time (I was doing it on my own, after all) and it took some investment into my home’s infrastructure, but it was worth it. I still smile when I look back at the first relative to experience my finely-tuned home network. He was a long-time cable internet user and was used to downloading video files over the course of several hours at a time. He came to my house and his video downloaded in less than 15 minutes. I couldn’t have been prouder. In some of my nerdier moments, I find myself running speed tests on my network just to revel a little in this fine specimen of a network.