I’ve mentioned my first job as a network engineer several times on this blog. I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, the biggest newspaper in Northern California. I was brought in to manage the network as a Cisco-certified engineer, having just passed a four-day CCNA bootcamp. Right before the dot-bomb economic crash, network engineers were […]
Category: NetStalgia
Apple Certified…what??
I’m thinking of doing some video blogging and kicking it off with a series with my thoughts on technical certifications. Are they valuable or just a vendor racket? Should you bother to invest time in them? Why do the questions sometimes seem plain wrong? Meanwhile, a little Netstalgia about the first technical certification I (almost) […]
On being a VOIP guy (not)
Well, the blog has been languishing for a while, as I’ve been extraordinarily busy with a new EVP, a round of layoffs, and many personal distractions. Here’s a little Netstalgia piece, not really technical, for your enjoyment. I’ve told a few stories about my years at the Cisco Gold Partner, where I did both pre- […]
Plungers and hard drives
Two articles (here and here) in my Netstalgia series covered the old bulletin board system (BBS) I used to operate back in the late 1980’s. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a Sysop (systems operator). How the BBS died is a lesson in product management. My BBS ran […]
A night of vi
It was four o’clock in the early hours of one Sunday morning in 2001. I had been up all night sitting in our data center at the San Francisco Chronicle with our Unix guy. He was handing off responsibility for managing the firewalls to the network team, and he was walking me through the setup. […]
It is the network
When I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, I started a project to bring Internet connectivity to a number of sites that had only limited mainframe circuits. To do this I decided to get DSL lines and run IPSec over them, a relatively new way of doing things for the time. It was a lot […]
My first Ethernet Network and Router
I’ve mentioned in the past how my first job in IT (starting in 1995) was as a “systems administrator” for a small company in Marin County, California. The company designed and built museum exhibits, and its team of around 60 employees was split between fabricators, who built the exhibits, and office workers. Some of the […]
Remote Access
As a part of my job at Cisco I’ve been looking into Zscaler and their offerings. It started me thinking back to the early days of remote access, and I figured it would make a good topic for Netstalgia. I wrote in the past about how bulletin board systems (BBSs) work, and in another article […]
A nauseating outage
When I worked for the Gold partner I generally serviced clients in the San Francisco Bay Area, but because we were a national partner I was occasionally called to other locations around the country. Being a double CCIE who had worked in TAC, I had a unique skill set among our engineers, which was often […]
For the love of wiring
We’ve moved into a wireless world, which is too bad for me because I love, more than anything, wiring. I miss the days of good old Cat 3 cable, T1 lines, and ISDN BRIs. I miss 66 blocks, punch down tools, cross-connect wire, and tone/probe kits. And butt sets. Especially butt sets. Now I just […]