Hello, I am Matt Glass, an IT Project Manager at Leidos and a Pluralsight Author. My IT career began with my military service in 2008 where I was trained in the United States Marine Corps as a data network specialist. Throughout my 8 years in the Marines I was responsible for configuring network equipment, servers, and workstations in various locations around the world. This experience served as a solid foundation for my career, and I give most of the credit to my supervisors along the way (Steve Young, Marson Griffith, Jason DeGroote, and Chris Nash in particular) for pushing me to learn and grow.

I started contributing to Pluralsight as an author after leaving the Marine Corps in late 2016 to continue giving something back to the community. In the same spirit of giving something back, I decided to start this blog and an associated YouTube channel to expand on my education efforts and track the status of various projects for anyone who wants to follow along.

Each week I will upload a guide here to serve as a project update along with a video walk through to my YouTube channel. In addition, I will occasionally post an explanation of a particular network protocol, or server application to provide an understanding of how my projects are operating in the background. I will also share scripts to help automate tasks and streamline your operations outside of what I cover in each project.

My first project centers around a problem I experienced within my own home. I have a simple monitoring capability built in to my WiFi router that tracks my children’s activity (Circle, if you are familiar). While this does track most of their activity, I found the filtering capability is limited, and Circle cannot determine the difference between an app communicating and each of my children actively using the devices.

For my project, I want to accomplish the following:

  • Enhance this capability
  • Improve my home network security
  • Block traffic on a more granular level
  • Improve traffic analysis and distinguish between background traffic and active user traffic
  • Centralize logging from each device I use to accomplish these tasks
  • Block known malicious traffic
  • Block ads if possible
  • Keep the budget low (I am trying to do this using Raspberry PIs)

I will post another entry and video with my hardware selection, design, and explanation for my choices.