A love letter to ISDN, bonded T1s, and every cable I have ever trusted with my career

Somewhere in a landfill there is a bonded ISDN line I personally installed, and it is still, in some spiritual sense, faster than the guest Wi-Fi at a Marriott. This is not a coincidence. This is a pattern I have watched repeat for the better part of three decades, and I would like to tell you about it, because nobody in my house wants to hear it anymore.

The Great Copper-to-Fiber Migration

At some point I directed the upgrade of an entire enterprise network from copper to a 10-gig fiber backbone, which sounds, in a resume bullet, like a clean and dignified sentence. It was not. It was weeks of crawling through ceiling tiles discovering that whoever ran the copper in 1994 had made choices — bold, unaccountable choices — and left no notes. Every network has an ancestor like this: some cable, somewhere, that nobody remembers pulling, that if you touch it wrong, quietly ends someone's afternoon three buildings away. We found four of them. We named one of them.

The Eight-Node Cluster That Just Wanted to Do Fluid Dynamics

I once stood up an eight-node Linux HPC cluster so engineers could run computational fluid dynamics simulations, and then a second four-node cluster because the first one, predictably, was never enough. There is a very specific kind of pride in watching a room full of machines you personally networked spend a weekend calculating how air moves over something, and a very specific kind of horror in realizing you are now also responsible for the air conditioning that keeps them from calculating anything at all. Nobody puts "became a part-time HVAC consultant" on the org chart, but here we are.

Migrating Sun Boxes to Active Directory, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Long Weekend

Somewhere in the middle of my career I helped migrate a fleet of Sun and Oracle servers into a proper Active Directory environment. This is the network-engineering equivalent of moving your entire extended family into a new house while they are all still living in it, arguing, and occasionally unplugging things "just to see." It worked. I would not recommend describing exactly how it worked to a therapist, because they will ask follow-up questions you are not equipped to answer at 2 a.m.

On SIEMs, and the Discovery That Everything Was Always Talking

The first time you point NetFlow, SNMP, and Syslog at a SIEM and just watch, you learn the actual truth of a network: it never shuts up. Printers you forgot existed are chatting. A switch in a closet is filing a report. Somewhere, a server is still trying to reach a domain controller that was decommissioned during the first Obama administration, hopeful as ever. Turning on real log visibility doesn't make your network more chaotic — it just finally lets you see the chaos that was there the entire time, like flipping on the kitchen light at midnight.

The One Universal Law

After ISDN, T1s, Token Ring's stubborn cousins, three different switching vendors, and enough cable crawling to qualify for hazard pay, I've landed on one law that has never once failed me: it is always DNS. It is DNS when it looks like a routing problem. It is DNS when everyone swears they already checked DNS. It was DNS during a migration I will not name, at an hour I will not name, in a building I have chosen to forgive.

Technology changes. The backbone gets faster, the acronyms get scarier, the racks get quieter and colder and somehow still catch on fire exactly once per career. But the fundamentals hold: someone, somewhere, is running a cable with no notes attached, and it is, once again, almost certainly DNS.