WINDOWS PAGE
As much as I love to bash the boys from Redmond and their monopolistic cohorts at Intel, I must admit that they started the Information age. Without Intel continuing Morse Law and Microsoft creating software that brought computing to the masses, I would probably not be writing this now.
I remember at a young age playing with my Dad's old IBM XT, which was pre Windows and ran on an early version of DOS. Needless to say I wasn't too impressed. My first real experiences with the Windows environment were with Windows 3.11, still not very impressed. When I got to college my dorms were wired with T1 lines and static IPs. Windows 95 had just come out, and this was when I really stated to learn about computer networking. Windows 95 was a big help to a neophyte with no formal network training. The explosion of the Internet made keeping my computer running and able to install the newest games (see DOOM) and view other types of content, possibly some of the adult nature, a necessity.
I floated around the next couple of years of college with a rather static skill set in the networking genre. I had started writing web pages, but as a student things like web space were provide by the university, and my only job was to keep my personal machine plugged in to the schools' vast resources.
In the summer before my senior year (99) I took a job in the business schools computer lab. I spent the summer helping load images on the 50 new machines. This was where I gained experience in building machines from scratch and working my way around a client/server environment.
After graduation I took a job as a junior programmer for an internet company that sold hotel rooms (TurboTrip.com), and ran on a Sun/Solaris platform. As I was not responsible for any of our network, just writing code, I took this opportunity to buy a Win 2000 book and make my own Windows 2000 web server on my DSL line at home. I eventually became very comfortable in this environment and hosted a handful of sites running on ISS5. I also learned the ropes of Microsoft's FTP and SMTP services, and how to configure an SSL.
In February of 2002 TurboTrip acquired an Austrian software company called hoboo.com. Hoboo ran in a complete Microsoft environment in order to utilize the .NET web development technologies. I was put in charge of managing our transaction intensive network with multiple VPN tunnels. We ran 3 load balanced web servers and one MSSQL (Sequel) database sever. While I was not responsible for configuring or supporting our Cisco PIX 505s, and load balancers, I did build the machines and was responsible for managing the backups via Vertias Backup Exec, and a Exabyte multi-tape loader.
I currently am co-owner and network administrator of an Internet company called NolaWebmasters. NolaWebmasters was founded in Feb of 2003, by my brother and me. We run a couple of Microsoft web and DNS severs, but most our websites now run on a Linux/Apache environment. I do use my Microsoft architecture to run ASP and .NET applications.