Billal Rehmani
IT student · networking & cybersecurity · Australia
IT student specialising in networking and cybersecurity, with five TAFE qualifications and a self-built home lab I use to turn coursework into working systems. I design, deploy and troubleshoot production-style infrastructure — firewalls, identity, monitoring, and intrusion detection — and document each build on this blog. Comfortable working methodically through complex, multi-layered problems, and fluent with modern AI-assisted development tools. Currently seeking an entry-level networking, security, or IT support role where I can apply this hands-on experience and keep growing.
Now
Experience
- Shaped and finished polycarbonate sheets — rounding, bending and moulding to spec.
- Maintained a clean, safe working environment in line with workplace standards.
- Prepared finished materials for dispatch, ensuring quality before shipping.
- Processed and fulfilled customer orders in Shopify, maintaining accurate invoice and label records.
- Collaborated with the product design team using Adobe Photoshop for label and packaging assets.
- Inspected incoming shipments for accuracy and routed stock to the correct departments.
- Conducted stock counts and maintained inventory control per company procedures.
Capstone project
Team lead in a group of five: coordinated the planning, built the core infrastructure, and ran blue-team detection across the live exercise.
- Designed a nine-zone network on Proxmox: pfSense as router-on-a-stick over seven 802.1Q VLANs, alias-based deny rules, and Red-to-Blue traffic denied both ways and logged.
- Built OpenVPN remote access with FreeRADIUS against Active Directory, where RADIUS group membership decides what a client can reach; proven live with an accepted member and a rejected non-member.
- Ran Suricata IDS on three segments, correlated against Wazuh, across four fixed-role attack-and-defence rounds, from reconnaissance to blocking-mode validation.
- Found and documented a real detection gap: the generic ruleset missed a boolean-based SQL injection, caught only in the database's query log, and the incident-response steps went into the blue-team playbook.
- Measured disaster recovery instead of estimating it: vzdump backups, an off-host copy and a timed restore, about 2 min 10 sec RTO against a 1-hour target.
- Troubleshot with evidence: a campus WAN outage isolated by packet capture, a RADIUS LDAP bind chain, a broken log pipeline, and domain-controller clock drift breaking Kerberos.
Skills gained
- Network segmentation & VLAN design
- pfSense firewall policy
- IDS/IPS (Suricata)
- SIEM correlation (Wazuh)
- RADIUS & AAA via Active Directory
- OpenVPN remote access
- Incident response
- Red / blue team exercises
- Backup & DR testing
- Proxmox virtualisation
- Team leadership
Home lab & automation projects
A self-hosted lab (Debian on VMware, behind pfSense) documented build-by-build on this blog. Each group links to its write-up.
- Designed an isolated lab network behind pfSense with separate trusted, IoT and guest VLANs, enforcing traffic rules between segments.
- Built and verified network isolation so the lab cannot reach the home network — validated with packet captures and firewall logs.
- Deployed single sign-on with Authentik, integrating firewall and dashboard logins via LDAP and OIDC.
- Ran a reverse proxy (Caddy) issuing automatic wildcard TLS certificates, and a self-hosted password vault, kept off the public internet.
- Built a metrics stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager) with push notifications to a phone for outages and disk pressure.
- Centralised firewall and server logs into a Loki SIEM, writing parsing pipelines and a live SSH brute-force detection rule that alerts on threshold breach.
- Ran authenticated OpenVAS/Greenbone scans against the lab and used the findings to close real security gaps.
- Consolidated remote access onto a hardened Tailscale mesh — subnet routing, split DNS, and least-privilege access rules — keeping a self-hosted WireGuard tunnel as independent backup.
- Scripted encrypted, off-box nightly backups with restore testing, and automated verification workflows.
Education
Capstone: team lead for a group of five, designing, building and then attacking and defending a nine-zone SOC network on Proxmox. Details under Capstone project, above.
Certifications
- CCNA — Introduction to Networking
- CCNA — Routing & Switching
- Cisco — Computer Hardware Basics
- AWS Cloud Foundations
Technical skills
- pfSense firewalls & VLAN segmentation
- Identity & SSO (Authentik, LDAP, OIDC)
- SIEM & log analysis (Loki, Grafana, Wazuh)
- IDS/IPS (Suricata)
- Monitoring (Prometheus, Alertmanager)
- Docker & container services
- VPN & remote access (WireGuard, Tailscale, OpenVPN)
- RADIUS & Active Directory (FreeRADIUS)
- Linux (Debian, Kali)
- Virtualisation (VMware, Proxmox)
- Bash scripting & automation
- AI-assisted workflows
Strengths
- Team leadership
- Self-directed & fast learner
- Methodical troubleshooting
- Clear technical writing
- Adaptable under pressure
Every project links to its write-up on this blog, which keeps the failures in. Ctrl/⌘ P saves this page as a PDF.