Lead Network Engineer working across enterprise networking, infrastructure automation, and security operations. I design, build, and run enterprise-grade infrastructure — routing, switching, firewalls, virtualization, identity, observability, and SIEM — and automate it like production, because it is.
📝 Writing and case studies: fnitguy.tech — deep dives on security response automation, deploying a SIEM from the ground up, observability stacks, and infrastructure-as-code for network devices.
Pre/post change validation for network maintenance windows: parallel state capture (Arista EOS, Palo Alto PAN-OS), noise-normalized diffs, and an interpreted HTML report with per-device impact scoring. Includes a sanitized sample report from a real 10-device maintenance window.
The starting skeleton I use for infrastructure-automation projects: a Python role pipeline (dry-run first, per-host error isolation, explicit registry), OpenBao-first secrets handling, gitignored inventories with checked-in examples, offline tests, and runbook skeletons. Marked as a GitHub template - click Use this template to start a project from it.
The youtube/ directory contains companion guides, scripts, and lab files
for videos published on the FN IT Guy YouTube channel.
Topics include:
- Cisco
- Juniper
- Palo Alto
- Network automation
- Operational tooling
Networking
Cisco • Arista • Juniper • Palo Alto • Cradlepoint
Automation
Python • PowerShell • Netmiko • REST APIs • Git
Infrastructure
Linux (RHEL) • KVM • Docker • Ceph • Pacemaker HA • Foreman/Katello
Observability & Security Operations
Prometheus • Grafana • Loki • Wazuh (SIEM/SOAR) • Zabbix • Graylog • LibreNMS • NetBox
Identity & Security
FreeIPA • FreeRADIUS • MFA • OpenBao • PKI • DISA STIG / OpenSCAP
Network engineers solve complex problems every day, but many of the tools and workflows remain undocumented or manual. Everything here — and the longer write-ups on fnitguy.tech — exists to share practical solutions, reusable automation, and honest lessons learned, so other engineers can learn, automate, and build better networks.