Tag: Network Engineering
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How Retiring One System Retired Another
The Wireless Gateway’s End Also Killed CheckPoint’s Cleartext Login One component retired. It killed an entire system on its way out. I only built one of them. Before wifi, Baylor’s residential network ran authentication through CheckPoint using a cleartext, telnet-emulated login. I’d already shipped client software for both Windows and Mac System 7 that talked…
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460 Devices, No Documentation, and the Pipeline That Changed That
The engagement had 460 managed devices and no current topology documentation. Network topology automation was the only viable path — manual spreadsheet work would have taken weeks and produced a point-in-time artifact no one could re-run. The Cisco design team needed three structured deliverables before they could move: device inventory, physical topology graph, VLAN/service map.…
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BGP Prefix Leak, RPKI, and the Cold Email That Confirmed It
A BGP route leak at an Internet2 customer site propagated more-specific prefixes into the global table, causing every major CDN to black-hole return traffic to an entire campus network. Diagnosing it required a cold email to a Google network engineer at 8:40am. This is the full story: the triage, the root cause, and the architectural…