C:\utilities\whoami.exe /?
Hello!
From my mid-teens, I have been very interested in computer networking, and more broadly point-to-point data transmission. My mother got separated when I was about 16, and that’s about the same time my interest in networking began. I had my own bank account as I had multiple jobs from the time I was 14, and I used my “income” on anything computer related I could afford, which at the time was not much! One of the things I could afford was America Online (AOL) and local Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) using my phone line. Being that I only had a 2400 BPS MODEM at the time, I spent most of my time on local BBS’s, but also a small part in AOL, mostly for school and stuff.
When my sophomore year was done, my mother and I moved from Illinois to Colorado, where my Grandmother was living at the time. It was at this time that my computer time, and more specifically Internet activity, really spiked. I began hanging out with like-minded people who spent much of their non-school life online. We used applications like ICQ (15395763) to communicate, and spent much of our time either talking, or downloading music from various IRC servers.
After graduating high school in 1998, I enlisted in the U.S. Army as a 98-Kilo, which was a ‘Non-Morse Interceptor/Analyst’. I learned all about radio-wave propagation, signal reporting, basic bit analysis, and then all the boring stuff like what “laws” we were required to follow and the various government lingo about our job. During my almost 13 years in the Army, I was stationed at the following locations:
- Corry Station, Pensacola, FL
- July 1998 – March 1999
- October 2003 – March 2004 – Intermediate Communications Signals Analysis Course
- May 2005 – July 2005 – Basic Digital Network Analysis Course
- January 2010 – May 2010 – Advanced Communications Signals Analysis Course
- Camp Humphreys, South Korea
- March 1999 – March 2000
- Fort George G. Meade, MD
- March 2000 – May 2005
- Fort Monmouth, NJ
- July 2005 – May 2008
- Buckley Space Force Base (Formerly AFB), Aurora CO
- May 2008 – December 2010
Sadly, I had intended to stay in until retiring in 2018, but the Army wanted to play their games and I was tired of the games. So in the summer of 2010, I requested and was approved for a voluntary discharge, which was an Honorable Discharge. In case someone finds my page and thinks that a ‘voluntary discharge’ is a type of discharge – it is not.
After leaving the Army, I worked in a series of companies/positions with an ever-increasing network engineering workload. During these positions, I endeavored to create a network monitoring system utilizing Icinga2; a vCenter infrastructure project between two network staging centers located in Orlando, FL and Baltimore, MD interconnected with a site-to-site VPN for vMotion and VM backup purposes; a network refresh project migrating a company from an Extreme based network to Meraki for its central monitoring/managing features. In my current role as a Senior IT Infrastructure Analyst, I manage my companies enterprise network hardware, and occasionally assist other infrastructure people with my companies various franchises. I am responsible for ensuring all LAN/WAN and cloud connections are up, and if they are not, ensuring the network traffic is swinging over to the alternate WAN link. I share responsibilities with our firewall engineers and occasionally write security rules to ensure necessary Internet resources are available, or harmful sites are blocked.
In closing, I am interested in all things network engineering and technology, Python3, and doing little projects on my Raspberry Pi-4B cluster. If you have any questions, or just want to drop me a line, feel free to Email Me! Thank you for taking an interest in my website and I hope you have a great day!
