Gideon Oteng
Network engineer. Platform builder. Things I run don't fall over.
Five years across Tier-1 ISP backbone at Cogent and enterprise managed services at CDW. CCNP Security. Running a two-node Proxmox cluster as production infrastructure : BGP mesh, zero-trust access, full observability, wildcard TLS. The same standards I'd hold at work, operated solo.
// Selected work
Things I've built
Netgate DNS Cutover Toolkit
A safety-gated toolkit on the pfSense REST API that caught a real outage before it could write anything, traced it to a Tailscale routing trap, fixed a bug in its own API client, then ran the actual DHCP cutover live.
AWS Private Cloud Lab
Production-style AWS stack with zero public EC2 exposure. Application traffic through an ALB; instance management via SSM Session Manager and VPC endpoints. no SSH, bastion, or NAT gateway.
SecureBytes Platform
Self-managed Proxmox cluster running production-style network and security infrastructure. Wildcard TLS, public status page, and selective Cloudflare Tunnel exposure.
// Field notes
Recent writing
Splunk got a VM, not a container
How the homelab SIEM was stood up. Proxmox Ubuntu VM, Splunk Enterprise install, listeners, indexes, and the five live sources that feed it.
When Tailscale breaks your LAN host's gateway
The host was up on the tailnet and dead to its own LAN. Accept-routes on a box that sits on the subnet someone else is advertising sends local traffic into a tunnel that cannot deliver it.
pfSense REST API v2 on Netgate | install, tradeoffs, and what it's good for
The community REST API package isn't in Netgate's Package Manager. Here's why I installed it anyway, how the one-liner install works, and what automation it unlocks on a homelab firewall.
// /now
What I'm working on
Day job
Operations Analyst at CDW. supporting hundreds of enterprise networks across SD-WAN, firewall, and cloud-connected environments.
Just shipped
Splunk got a VM, not a container
Building next
Network automation toolkit: Ansible playbooks for LXC bootstrap, nginx vhosts, Netgate Unbound DNS sync, and TLS cert distribution.