Computers

From an early age, I’ve been exposed to electronics through my dad whom worked as an Electronics Technician.  Starting out playing games on the Commodore 64 and VIC-20, our family then got an IBM PC 286 somewhere around the time I was in 2nd grade. I was hooked and haven’t left the computer since.

Early Operating Systems and Applications

The first PC program I used was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – World Tour electronic coloring book.  My dad had downloaded it from a shareware BBS.

First operating system I remember using was MS-DOS 5.0 then 6.2/6.22 shortly after. Along with DOS, used GeoWorks Pro, an early desktop graphical user interface and productivity site popular before Windows became the de facto standard.  Windows 3.1 was the first version of Windows.  I remember the fanfare around Windows 95.  Unlike my best friend and his dad, none of us stood in line for a copy of what would be a revolution in computing and one of the most important operating system releases in history.

School

Always a PC guy, my school system had their stock of Apple IIe machines elementary and middle school classrooms (circus 1992-1998). First exposure to Apple Macintosh was in elementary school with the Macintosh LCII and LC/Performa 575 (circus 1994-1995).

First time online (circus 1996/97) was in Parkside Middle School Library (school since been demolished) with the school Technology Coordinator.  This was the era of dial-up modems.  Yahoo! search engine was the first site visited.

By high school (1999), computer classes were becoming available as electives.  Such classes were: Computer Graphics (Corel Draw), Computer Applications (Microsoft Office), and Computer Programming (MS Visual Basic 6).  After joining WHBS-TV, a friend and myself designed computer graphics for the station.  We did some planned graphics but often used our laptops to create and render graphic animations on the spot (after rendering) using Ulead Cool 3D – as it was an inexpensive and powerful package.

Wanting to pursue a career in computers, initially attended Bowling Green State University in 2002, majoring in Computer Science.  This was my first experience using Unix.  My first CS class was a disaster.  The teacher taught programming using the chalkboard (though a computer was available in class) and the professor was generally terrible – I changed my major to Management of Information Systems (MIS).  Though I thought programming would be more profitable, I never cared for programming and enjoyed the business aspect much more.  Sometime during college, discovered the virtualization technology MS Virtual PC (now Hyper-V) which allowed me to try other operating systems instead of trying to partition hard drives and dual boot my system.

After avoiding another disaster, BGSU CBA, transferred to Cleveland State University (2006) which was the best decision for my academic career.  It proved to be a night and day over BGSU where professors cared about student success and advisors had a clue.  A Windows/Linux lab at CSU where groups had to setup services on a Windows and a Linux workstation – such as HTTP, FTP, DHCP, DNS, setup users & groups, and file shares – and the other platform had to be able to access or utilize those services.  This is when I transitioned to using VirtualBox because it supported Linux operating systems (VPC did not).

Gaming

My gamer phase was elementary school through most of college.  Started out with shareware games dad downloaded from shareware BBSes.  Got a shareware copy of Doom from my best friend and had to make boot disks to clear enough ram for the program load.  Was swapping games with friends by middle school.  In high school, file sharing gained popularity.  Scour and Kazaa Lite were my choices to download music, software, and games.  By college, Kazaa Lite, BitTorrent, and Soulseek (still exists) were my choices.

HLDS & Building Servers

Freshman year of college started playing Counter-Strike with dormmates and occasionally online.  During online play, noticed game servers had extras not part of the core game server.  After beginning to tinker, I made HLDS servers for Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic on my Dell Inspiron 8100 (Pentium 3, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP, 20 GB HDD) Windows laptop that I wasn’t using too much of in college (see computer classes I was taking taught on the chalkboard).

HLDS mods that I experimented with and used: Metamod/MM-P, Adminmod, AMX/Mod X, Clanmod, FoxBot, HLGuard, HLStats/X, PsychoStats, StatsMe, and Webmod.  Nearly all are no longer maintained and websites are long defunct.

My servers were available on campus to BGSU students during the school year my freshman year (2003) and subsequent years.  Last couple years at BGSU, I brought a repurposed desktop to be a dedicated server in my dorm room.

After college, these were briefly hosted on Virtual Private Servers (VPS) at a cloud provider.  They remained online until Steam updated – either the server or game – and the number of players went to nearly zero.

Media/HTPC

Since about the time I got into doing TV things with computers (2001) and joined WHBS-TV, I’ve had a TV capture card installed in my computers.  At first, it was for converting TV/VHS to digital forms for storage and posting online.  As features became available, turned my PC into a DVR, commonly referred to as a Home Theater PC (HTPC).

My favorite hardware was the Hauppauge line of TV capture cards, but their software was crap and frequently crashed.  At some point, found GB-PVR (now NextPVR) which solved all stability problems of WinTV.  This lead into using Plex Media Server and now Jellyfin.

Online Services

Since having broadband DSL (maybe 2003), I’ve hosted my site and videos using a WIMP stack initially.  Eventually moved to LAMP and then paid hosting.

Open-source

The people I worked with at one of my internships (circus 2004) were pretty serious (outside of work) in various aspects of computing.  I needed a new router and asked one of the guys which he recommended.  It was the LinkSys WRT-54G/GL/GS series.  I went with the GL Linux variant in case I wanted to go down the 3rd-party firmware route.

After using Tomato and subsequent forks (AdvancedTomato, Shibby, FreshTomato), I was amazed at the features implemented by community developed and supported custom firmware images.  These images for consumer network gear implement advanced features including: Linux based, SSH server/CLI access, bandwidth monitoring, Dynamic DNS, wireless radio adjustments and tweaks.  Unlike cheap consumer router firmware, these are updated for a longer hardware service life.

Currently:

  • Use FreshTomato for wireless Ethernet bridges
  • Run Fedora as my daily driver operating system.  I got fedup reigning in Windows 10 telemetry, out-of-control interface changes, and unstable releases.  The decision to switch largely stemmed from using Linux at work, using Raspberry Pi devices, and hosting services on Linux operating systems.  I started running Fedora full time since Fedora 25.
  • A big fan of self hosting many internal services hosted on my own Proxmox server, which follow the Free and open-source model.  My cloud is at 127.0.0.1.

Security

Couple years ago, I found myself interested, as a user and programmer, in the work done by security researchers to uncover issues with computing devices and software and how those could be used by bad actors.

I follow Brian Kreb’s blog, Security Now with Steve Gibson and the Sans Institute’s StomCast podcasts.  One thing I want to learn more about it is how-to pen test.

Networking

During my internship, I was exposed to (and able to shadow) the networking team.  I was interested in networking but didn’t understand most of it as it was “black magic.”  Made the jump to home networking and securing networks using managed switches and managed firewall (2018).  Explored VLANs, LAGG, firewall rules, NAT, policy based routing, DNSBL, IP BL, traffic shaping, multiple-WAN, multiple VPN configurations, and secure hosting with Cloudflare tunnels (2024).

Work

My part time job in high school afforded me the opportunity to work on the office computers doing troubleshooting, upgrades, and consulting on new purchases.  I did additional website work pioneering the usage of PDF documents and streaming audio services.

My internship, I worked on two teams.  The first configuring software and hardware for new users including mobile devices, relocating PC equipment for department moves or job changes, and hardware or software changes.  The second team was the break-fix to the first.

Out of college, landed a job doing second level support.  Supporting all aspects of the system hardware, software, network, and supporting systems including development and testing.

Following that, development and third level support for merchandise management, credit card processing, and supporting systems.

Currently, supporting security integrations, LAN, egress, and ICS firewalls, web proxy, remote access, and zero trust network access (ZTNA).

Ham radio

Many of my computer interests crossover to Ham Radio.  This is currently what I spend most of my time doing.

Computer build history

I’ve built every desktop system I’ve ever owned.  Here is a quick history of what I remember the last configuration to be.

386.  170 & 212 MB HDD.

Celeron 333.

Celeron 800.  768 MB RAM.  DVD-ROM, CD-RW, Iomega Internal Zip 100.  Creative Audigy.  WinTV-GO-FM.

Pentium 4 Hyper Threaded.  2 GB RAM.  80 & 250 GB HDD.  DVD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-RW, Iomega Internal ZIP 100.  Creative Audigy 2.  Hauppauge PVR-350.

Pentium Core i7 Sandybridge 2600K.  8 GB RAM.  2x 650 GB & 2x 1 TB HDD – RAID 1.  DVD-RW.  Asus NVidia GTX 460.  Asus Xonar DX.  Hauppauge PVR-1850.

 

By the way, the “circus” reference is a tribute to Donnie Baker from the Bob and Tom Show – who said circus instead of circa.

Ham radio and tech.