Welcome to Wo-Net

It's a terrible name, but I needed something, perhaps I'll change it to something else later.  The purpose of this blog is to help me understand networking concepts better.  Perhaps others can benefit from it as well.  It's inspired by other blogs like evilrouters and packetlife and it's in the same vein.

A little about myself:

• My name is Andrew Waranowski.  
• I work at Dell doing technical support.  
• My certifications are: CCNA, CCNP, ACMA, VCA-DCV.  
• I'm 30 years old.  
• I currently live in Round Rock, TX, two minutes away from Dell HQ. 
• I play bass guitar and trombone.  

I'm interested in networking because it, especially ISPs, have become a utility on which the modern world runs.  Software, businesses, and applications all rely on computer networks.  I also think it's pretty cool how we're able to zip giant sums of meaningful information from one continent to another in milliseconds.  And how realtime communication is made possible by encapsulating computer information into packets with source and destination addresses and passed along by special-purpose devices we call routers.  It's pretty freaking nuts where we are right now, and I think it's only the beginning.  So yeah, I think networking is interesting and important.

Aspects of networking that I'm particularly interested in are:

• Software-defined networking
• Security
• Simplifying networking so that more networks use a common platform. 
• The application of ordinary and well known engineering concepts to the engineering of networks and network devices.  
• Redundancy, Fault tolerance, and redundancy tolerance
• Network reliability

Anyway, I know a good deal, but wouldn't yet consider myself an expert.  So if I make mistakes, please feel free to correct me.  Enjoy.