About me

20+ years in the IT world with extensive experience and knowledge of IP networks. I have seen both sides of the Information Technology business. I have worked in the enterprise that needs its servers running, backups, VPNs and virtualization. Getting the printer unjammed or helping the office admin with a vbscript to automate a repetitive task. Been there, done that.

I have also worked in the datacenter landscape and at an ISP and still work there today. As a large Metro Ethernet provider you work with different routing protocols and design for redundancy and uptime. You get to work with many different vendor equipment. Let's have a Cisco switch do ether-channel to an Extreme Networks switch, done. Let's see if we can use that Juniper to enforce bandwidth rate policies. Done. Wonder if this open source software would scale to support this and that, it does. Need to translate vlans or setup BGP with a new customers, done.

Recently I have worked on a large project to build a carrier backhaul network. As a team we implemented an optical core that supports multiple G.8032 rings. It was exciting to see all these different parts come together and today servicing the customer with low latency and high availability.

The ISO OSI layer model actually makes sense to me. I feel most comfortable within the first 4 layers of that model, the physical, data and network layers and the transport layers.

Specialties: I like the open source software scene. The concept of many different skilled programmers working together on a project to improve software is amazing. There is so much talent out there. Look a your top open source projects like zabbix, sugarcrm, ntop, nagios, asterisk and cacti.

The network world is full of specialization, but I have a good all-around understanding of it. I can troubleshoot a linux box having an issue one day and a packet loss on a private ethernet circuit the other day. Most issues are common sense troubleshooting.