This blog started in March 2017 as a way to document what I was learning — Cisco switching, VLANs, DHCP — the fundamentals every network engineer wrestles with at some point. What began as study notes turned into a chronicle of certifications, home lab builds, and the occasional vendor-induced headache.
Timeline
2017 — The beginning
The first post went live on 29 March 2017. It said very little: I’d been working with networks for years, I was studying, and writing things down in public seemed like a better way to remember them than a folder of text files. The reasoning still holds. Most of what is on this site exists because I needed it once, could not find it written down clearly, and worked it out at a console.
The first technical post, routes via DHCP, followed the same day. The early content after that was classic new-blogger material: switchport configurations explained and the Cisco native VLAN mystery — both since rewritten from the vendor documentation rather than from memory.
April brought a short note that reads differently now than it did then. We had just replaced a Cisco 2911 with a MikroTik 1100 at one of our sites, and it was not an isolated decision — Russian ISPs were switching to MikroTik across the board, because the hardware was cheap, capable enough, and did not carry a Cisco licensing bill or a Cisco-shaped salary behind it. At the time, as someone building a career on Cisco kit, I found that genuinely unsettling. In hindsight it was an early local instance of something that went on to happen almost everywhere: the low end of the routing market being taken by whitebox and low-cost vendors, and Cisco value moving up-stack into the things MikroTik does not do — identity, segmentation, assurance. That is more or less the direction this blog took too.
In June, I wrote about Cisco certification paths and committed to the CCIE goal in public, which is a good way to make yourself follow through. August brought two certs — HE.net IPv6 on the 2nd, then CCNA R&S on the 19th. Both are covered in the certifications section below.
July 2017 was productive: Making Home Lab Part 1 and a FreeBSD torrent/NAS server build. The home lab series became the most-read content on the site.
December brought the Juniper SRX cheat sheet, site-to-site IPsec between Juniper and Cisco through MikroTik NAT, a private VPN server guide, and the Cisco Cyber Ops scholarship announcement.
2018 — Cyber Ops
Passed CCNA Cyber Ops in May. The security track was heating up, and this certification mapped directly to the work I was doing.
2019 — Broadening out
Office 365 calendar permissions via PowerShell, NBN FTTP status lights (still relevant for Australian readers), and getting a telnet client back on macOS for EVE-NG. The lab was growing and the content was diversifying beyond pure Cisco.
2024 — Revival
Then a five-year gap. Work got busy, the lab got rebuilt more than it got written about, and the site sat still.
It came back in November 2024 on mike.ydn.au, with fresh technical content straight away: Cisco config archive and rollback and finding unused ports on Cisco switches. The scope has not really changed since 2017 — Cisco, Juniper, Linux, and whatever the lab is currently doing — just the depth.
2026 — Block theme rebuild
The site was rebuilt from scratch as a WordPress block theme — navy chrome, cyan accents, automatic dark mode, and full JSON-LD structured data. Same content, modern foundation.
The same rebuild was also an editorial pass. Two posts turned out to be verbatim copies of other people’s writing that had been saved here years earlier without being marked as such; both were rewritten from the vendor documentation. Two more that carried an attribution line but were still somebody else’s article word for word got the same treatment. Short announcement posts — including the ones this page absorbed — were folded into this timeline. Anything that was demonstrably wrong or dangerously out of date was corrected rather than quietly deleted, and where a post taught something that is no longer good practice, the original is kept with a correction above it.
Domains
Three addresses in the site’s life, which is why an old link may not resolve:
- yudin.us (2017) — the original. The domain lapsed and no longer has a DNS record, so anything still pointing at it is dead. Images that were hotlinked from it have been repointed at the local media library.
- mike.ydn.id.au (December 2017) — the first move, and the point at which this stopped feeling like a scratchpad.
- mike.ydn.au (2024) — current, shorter, and where the revival happened. This is the canonical home; everything published here lives under it.
Certifications
Five short posts used to live here as separate announcements — a sentence each,
competing with one another for the same search. They’re folded into this timeline
instead, which is where anyone actually looking for the sequence would want them.
June 2017 — setting the goal
I’d been working with networks for over eight years at that point and had always
had the CCIE somewhere in the back of my mind. June was when I made it an actual
goal rather than a someday: start at CCNA R&S and work up. The study notes that
became a lot of this blog’s early content came out of that decision, worked through
the CCNA R&S 200-125 Official Cert Guide alongside CBT Nuggets.
2 August 2017 — HE.net IPv6 Sage
Hurricane Electric’s free IPv6 certification, done mostly for fun. It’s a practical
gauntlet rather than a written exam — you have to stand up real IPv6 connectivity,
working forward and reverse DNS, a reachable web server and mail server over v6,
and pass a quiz at each tier. It teaches you more about operating dual-stack than
any amount of reading. They also promised a t-shirt.
19 August 2017 — CCNA Routing & Switching (200-125)
The first real milestone on the site, and the one that set the direction for
everything after it. Next goal at the time was CCNP.
December 2017 — Cisco Cyber Ops scholarship
Cisco ran a global scholarship programme to grow the security-operations talent
pool, covering training and exam costs for the CCNA Cyber Ops track. Getting a
place on it is what pushed my focus from routing and switching towards security,
which is the direction the blog has taken since.
22 May 2018 — CCNA Cyber Ops
Passed the second of the two exams and finished the certification. The security
track lined up directly with the work I was doing by then, which made it the rare
cert where the study material and the day job reinforced each other.
Since then the focus has been CCNP Security, Cisco ISE, and the Cisco Champion
programme — see about me for where that ended up.
What this site is
Mike’s Lab Notes is a personal blog. It’s not a commercial operation, not sponsored, and not affiliated with any vendor. I write about things I’ve configured, broken, fixed, or studied — mostly Cisco, Juniper, Linux, and the occasional PowerShell script. If it helps another engineer at 2am, it’s done its job.
You can reach me at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.