Welcome!

Welcome to Mostly Networks. My name is Scott McDermott and I’m a Network Engineer. This is my blog where I will write (mostly) about data networking. My focus will be on the enterprise and small datacenters, since that’s the environment in which I work. Please pardon the lack of inspiring web design. I’m going to start writing and over time perhaps the site will see some more inspiring design. If I work on the look of the site first I’ll keep fiddling with it forever and I’ll never write…

Personal Background

I’ve been a sysadmin for 18 years, 14 years of which have been at my current employer. In the beginning, I spent most of my time managing the network and critical infrastructure. We only had eight servers back then. I have spent progressively less time managing the network as our number of servers has grown to over 150. Last year we hired a second sysadmin to focus on our servers which has freed me to focus primarily on the network again.

It’s hard to do a good job managing a network when the other parts of your job take up the majority of your time. It’s great to be spending most of my time working on the network again. Alas, when your network hasn’t seen significant TLC for most of the last 10 years, it’s a bit of a job to bring it back up to snuff.

What I think I will and won’t be writing about

That’s a lot of what I’ll be writing about. Fixing the network with the old design and the old gear. I’ll also be writing about managing a small datacenter’s infrastructure, such as making sure that you have enough power and cooling for those 30 servers you just found out you need to add. I will not to write much about sysadmin topics, except where it really touches on the life of the network engineer. I will write a little about the certification and professional development of the network engineer. I will be heavily Cisco oriented, because I’m in a Cisco shop. I won’t be writing about VMWare at all, because we are a Hyper-V shop.

Note: Want to know how to make almost any vendor stop and get lost with their pitch? Tell them you have Hyper-V instead of VMWare. Very few are prepared to deal with that.

Off we go…

I have a some posts brewing on some of these topics, but I really wanted to post an introduction first. I hope you find the blog useful and enjoy reading it.

I can be reached via twitter at @scottm32768 and via email at [email protected].

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