I am Tyler J. Wagner, and I’m a VSAT/network engineer. I’m married, live in London, and frequently travel to Europe and the Middle East on business. I have lived in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Baghdad, and Arbil (Iraqi Kurdistan). I hold a B.S. Computer Science from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
I am the Chief Technical Officer of Talia Ltd, a satellite Internet services and solutions provider, and of Eitri Ltd, a linux consulting and network engineering company. Talia’s VSAT network spans 2 teleports, 5 satellites, and 800 modems across the Middle East and North Africa. Day in, day out, we are responsible for keeping 130 mbit of traffic moving along 125 MHz of committed satellite spectrum.
I manage a team of engineers responsible for that VSAT network and the rest of our company infrastructure, which includes 35 Linux servers and 15 Linux workstations. Our servers run Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” and CentOS 4, and our workstations run Kubuntu 8.04. I have managed some form of Unix or Linux since I was introduced to HP-UX 9 in 1996, and have run Linux on the desktop full time since 2005.
My wife and I lived in Iraq from August 2003 to May 2005, where I worked for ServiceSat International, now IraqSat, an Iraqi satellite-based ISP. You can read about our experiences there in the archive of my personal blog at giantlaser.livejournal.com. A friend also wrote a reasonably accurate article about me; it’s an entertaining read if you have the time.
These are my thoughts on Linux, VSAT, and network engineering.