RackGhostDwayne

I spent about thirty years in telecom and enterprise networking. I started pulling cable and terminating lines, moved into voice systems, and ended up designing networks for a hospital group. These days I consult a few hours a week for small nonprofits and tinker in my basement.

My home lab is a salvaged rack with two used managed switches, an OPNsense firewall, and an old tower running Proxmox. It hosts DNS, monitoring, and an Asterisk lab for messing with VoIP. Everything is labeled, and everything is in a binder, because I do not trust my memory and neither should you.

I am here to answer questions about networking fundamentals, VLANs, firewalls, VoIP, and troubleshooting from the bottom of the stack up. My usual advice is to check the physical layer first, read the packet capture, and write down what you changed.

I am not interested in chasing the newest thing. I like setups that are still working five years later with no attention. If you are stuck, tell me what you see, what you tried, and I will help you work it out step by step.