TNO074: Lean Teams, Big Demands: Managing K-12 Complexity with AIOps (Sponsored)

Scott Robohn (0:10)

Welcome to Total Network Operations, the podcast for all you pack and delivery personnel. Our mission is simple to bring out great ideas and network operations. I'm your friendly neighborhood podcast host, Scott Robohn. And today, I want to welcome Ben Shapiro.

Ben is a senior network engineer at the Eugene, Oregon School District 4J, the sixth largest public school district in Oregon. He's also a misfit with HPE Networking. They're a proud sponsor today. Thank you, HPE.

And he's recognized as a missed expert as part of their technical advocacy through leadership and community. So Ben, welcome to the show. Why don't you give us a brief introduction of yourself and how you have a really interesting path before you got into networking. Tell us a little bit about that first.

Ben Shapiro (0:53)

Well, I'm so excited to be here, Scott. Believe it or not, I listened to a bunch of Packet Pushers podcasts and even this one. So I don't know how I got here, but I guess we're here to have a conversation.

I haven't been a network engineer for that long. I will be starting my sixth year as a network engineer in December. And I founded, like all network engineers do, through a variety of life choices. So do you want to start with the origin? Where did I start?

Scott Robohn (1:27)

Your superhero origin story is perfectly appropriate.

Ben Shapiro (1:31)

Well, when I went to college, I was really interested in science and I was told I had to choose one and I chose chemistry. And I just did not love the eight hour long like freshman chemistry lab on a Friday. And I started looking around for other majors in the sciences and I found geology. And that's why I latched on to it because it was like, hey, I get to do all the science. And I took that all the way up into a doctoral program, which brought me to Eugene at the University of Oregon, where I modeled the microbes on rocks with supercomputers. And I did that for like 90 percent of the doctoral program and then decided that I didn't want to be in academia.

Roger. So I did the thing that was the opposite of grad school, which was make wine. Because it still used all the knowledge and modeling I'd gained of the fermentation process. And I did that for four years and that was glorious. But it was not really a great job from a salary standpoint. Let's just say like for an art form and a blending of science and art. Wonderful. I want to get back to it. And I miss it every day. But I started looking around for what's my next adventure.

And I was in a bar in Eugene, Oregon one evening. And I uttered the words FreeBSD, because for the past decade, like in grad school and making wine, I've been tinkering with networking and servers in my garage. And someone in that perk there is of, Oh, Unix?

And it just so happened to be the CEO of a fiber to the home startup in Eugene. And a couple weeks later, he's like, I need you. And I was like, what?

And I started working and I started two weeks before the COVID lockdown in Oregon. And I suddenly had to re-engineer the entire network. And the first device I touched was an MX480.

Scott Robohn (3:32)

Okay.

Ben Shapiro (3:33)

And I did BGP engineering, which made me like, what's BGP?

And I was directed towards the RFC or BGP by the CEO. RFC 1771

Scott Robohn (3:44)

Very good.

Ben Shapiro (3:45)

Yeah. Yeah. Napkins. It's great. That's right.

And I realized that the RFCs are like an academic journal, and I just ate them up. And that's where I dint all my network knowledge is just reading the RFCs like an academic peer-reviewed journal.

Scott Robohn (4:01)

That's a great connection. I've never thought of it that way, but you're right. And they often represent research and what, but not how.

Implementations of RFCs can vary widely versus what's in the academic research.

Ben Shapiro (4:19)

Then there's the vendor implementation. Just get me talking about EVP and VXLAN, and you'll find out. Oh yeah. That's how I got into networking. And I helped build a Fiverr to the Home network in rural Lane County, the county that Eugene sits in.

And I got 15 percent of the CARES Act money delegated for Oregon to build a lot of Fiverr out there. So not only did I learn networking, I learned how to design outside plant, I learned how to design negative 48 volt DC power systems.

Scott Robohn (4:53)