About

I am Tyler J. Wagner, and I’m a sysadmin and network/satellite engineer. I 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 can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

I am the Chief Technical Officer of Talia Ltd, a satellite Internet services provider and Linux consulting and network engineering company. Talia operates its own teleport and maintains a VSAT network spanning 7 satellites and 1300 modems across the Middle East and Africa. Every day, we are responsible for keeping 140 mbit of traffic moving along 200 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 50 Linux servers and 25 Linux workstations. Our servers run a mix of Ubuntu, CentOS and RHEL, and our workstations run Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I have managed some form of Unix 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 our personal blogs at giantlaser.livejournal.com and slownewsday.livejournal.com. I recommend you start here. A friend also wrote a reasonably accurate article about my time there; it’s an entertaining read if you have the time.

These are my thoughts on Linux, VSAT, and network engineering.