Hi. My name is Daniel, and I am Unix System Engineer based in the Raleigh, NC area. I have two main areas of interest in IT: operating systems and networking/communications.

Regarding operating systems, you probably guessed (correctly) that I prefer Unix-like OSes. My first introduction to Unix was on a DEC MicroVAX, in 1989. I was at university, wandering down the hall in my dorm (NCSU's Turlington Hall), and I saw a command prompt that I knew was not a DOS prompt. I started up a conversation with my fellow resident, who told me all about it. Ever since then, it has been Unix all the way for me: Ultrix, IRIX, A/UX, various BSDs, various Linux distributions, NeXTSTEP, SunOS, Solaris, and macOS, and many others. My current favorites are FreeBSD and macOS.

Regarding networking/communications, I was once a ham radio operator, and I collect antique telephones. My favorite phone is a US Navy shipboard phone I picked up at an antique show. I find a computer to be useless to me unless it is reachable remotely.

Put these things together, and you find my sweet spot: network infrastructure (Cisco routers and switches, F5 load balancers, and Radware WAFs) and virtualization (VMware vCenter).

I also do quite a bit today with Ansible. We automate as much as we can using that tool.

Current certifications:

  • VCP6 - VMware Certified Professional

In progress:

  • CCNA - Cisco Certified Network Associate
  • F5-CA - F5 Certified BIG-IP Administrator

I am also an Atari fan, and I run an Atari-related blog at ataridude.net.