About CostiSer.Ro

About me

Hello and welcome to my blog !

My name is Costi Serban and I am a network and security engineer with over 10 years of experience in multi-vendor environments.
I started this blog while I was preparing for the CCIE R&S Lab exam, but at that time I did not write a lot of articles due to time constraints. Later on, after achieving "the number" 37390, I decided to continue my blogging activity as a method to share my experience and to keep my own knowledge alive.

I wanted to make this blog as interactive as possible, so I have decided that all my articles would be preceded by a quiz - in this way, I describe a networking problem in the form of a quiz, I expect people to perform their own testing and/or reasoning and give me an answer, and later on, I publish a separate article with a collection of solutions according to my own understanding.
I strongly believe that, after going through an introductory quiz, the reader will learn much more about the presented topic or technology.

As of December 2015, the range of articles expanded with the introduction of SDN lessons and a new set of articles called Quiz of the Day (QOTD). The SDN articles reflect my belief that it represents the future of networking, while the QOTD series is intended to keep this blog alive and interactive.

About this blog

For a long period this blog was based on the Wordpress platform, but starting with 2015 I have decided to migrate it onto a Python-based platform. The main reasons to do so were:

• I could not keep up with the pace of updates on Wordpress, so my blog contained a lot of outdated plugins
• I was not happy with the mobile version generated by Wordpress
• I wanted something based on Python, as this is the programming language that I feel most comfortable with, at this moment
• last but not least, I wanted to have full control of everything that exists on my website

The migration process was not an easy one ☹... but this was mostly due to my perfectionist approach, as I was never happy with the end result.
In the end, after spending a lot of time playing with Django and Mezzanine, I have chosen to go with Pelican, a static site generator powered by Python. Besides being written in Python, it requires no database nor server-side logic and, very important for me, it allows me to write my articles in Markdown.

Disclaimer

This is a professional blog of a network and security engineer and it reflects personal opinions and conclusions based on experience and individual testing.
It does not represent the position of my current or past employers.
Solutions and technologies described here may require advanced expertise to understand and use. Some information may be incorrect or incomplete so usage on production platform will need exact understanding and prior testing. Use it on your own risk. Author is not liable in case of any damages in production.

More info on FAQ page !