About Me

I'm Micheal Garner, a Network Engineer with over 35 years of hands-on experience spanning the entire arc of modern networking — from the early days of bulletin boards and dial-up internet over DOS with Winsock, through the complexity of today's enterprise SDWAN deployments.

Currently working at Vodafone, I design and build SDWAN networks using platforms from Cisco, Fortinet, VMware, Arista, and Palo Alto. My career has taken me through almost every major network technology: TDM and modem technologies, PDH, SDH, Frame Relay, X.25, ATM, ISDN, then into the IP era with MPLS, IPVPN, QoS, VoIP, and now SDWAN at scale.

Why This Site

This isn't a job-hunting portfolio — I'm not looking for a new role. This site exists to share knowledge built over three and a half decades in the industry. Good documentation is rare in networking. Clear, practical guides written by someone who has actually deployed the technology at scale are rarer still.

My intention is to build a body of reference material that's genuinely useful: structured guide series covering Fortinet from NSE4 to NSE7, Linux and scripting for network engineers, Python automation, and content covering Cisco, Arista, and Juniper platforms. Alongside that, a blog for technical commentary, new technology assessments, and the occasional opinion piece.

Background

I've worked across the full stack of network technologies throughout my career. The breadth is unusual — most engineers of my generation specialised early, but the nature of the work I've done has demanded genuine depth across multiple disciplines: transport, routing, security, virtualisation, automation, and increasingly AI-augmented operations.

I'm Linux-comfortable, Python-capable, and deeply familiar with the major enterprise vendors. I approach networking as an engineering discipline — rigorous, methodical, and always focused on making things that actually work in production.

About This Site's Infrastructure

This site is self-hosted on hardware in my home network, served via Caddy behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, built with Astro, and deployed through an automated pipeline that uses the Claude API and a custom MCP server. The entire stack is documented on this blog — because building things and explaining how they work is exactly the point.