i ran a bbs called country connect in 1998 — one line, wildcat 4, a hayes 14.4, and a grand total of two users. we were on fidonet. it lasted until my parents wanted the phone back. i've been doing some version of that ever since: run the thing yourself, on hardware you own, and find out why it's slow.

in between: junior network admin at the high school i was still attending, ATM LANE that never behaved, a degree's worth of cisco, several years inside copy machines, nine years keeping the sciences and an HPC cluster running at a liberal arts college — and eventually back to the little pc repair shop i started at in '99, which had quietly become an isp.

this blog is what falls out. things i measured instead of assumed, things that broke in interesting ways, and notes from the other long project — 9 months, 2 weeks, 6 days in, and finding out that transition, like everything else here, is mostly patience plus documentation. ⚗️