Brief Summary

I have over 30 years’ experience in the IT industry, most of which has been spent in networking/telecoms in the UK/EMEA and NZ/APAC.  I have worked in varied roles such as technical consulting, network design and architecture, pre-sales support, operational support and software engineering/development.  After moving to New Zealand in October 2008, I worked in several roles for over 13 years, before moving back to the UK in March 2022.

My experience has been gained in a wide range of organisations, from start-ups, through enterprises and to large service providers and telcos.  I have worked in both team environments and on an individual and independent basis.  In recent years, I have also done a lot of my work in the public sector.

My background has a strong hands-on element to it, and as such I get satisfaction from being able to test a design in a lab to prove that it will work before deployment in a production environment.  To back this up, I have over 25 years’ experience with Cisco’s IOS, routers and switches, as well as more than 15 years’ experience with Juniper’s JUNOS, routers and NetScreen firewalls.

I very much enjoy customer-facing roles since no two customers are alike, and so the variety this gives is always a challenge that I am keen to take on.  Taking part in in-depth technical discussions with customers forms a key part of being able to fully understand their requirements, which is essential to being able to deliver a successful solution.

Latest News and Useful Articles                — Updated: 30 November 2023 —

• The BGP MED saga.  [ipSpace]

• Secret White House warrantless surveillance programme.  [Schneier]  [Wired]

• Can a router use the default route to reach BGP next hops?  [ipSpace]

• Network automation with GitHub Actions.  [ipSpace]  [GitHub]

• Going CCNP Emeritus.  [ipSpace]  [Daniel Teycheney]

• Geoff Huston: stop shaming service providers for outages.  [The Register]

• Zero-day flaws see routers and cameras co-opted into Mirai botnet.  [The Register]  [Ars Technica]

• Why do we need BGP identifiers?  [ipSpace]

• Call the routing police!  [Geoff Huston]

• USB worm unleashed by Russian state hackers spreads worldwide.  [Ars Technica]  [Schneier]

• Is BGP TTL security any good?  [ipSpace]

• Saying goodbye to the full stack journey.  [Scott Lowe]

A more comprehensive news/article list can be found on my networks sub-domain here.

Click here for the latest full version of my CV, or find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).

rob (at) larsenconsulting (dot) net

© Robert Larsen.  All rights reserved.