Unlimited Fiber Output

Although I liked my previous company CurtCo Media Group, at one point the job was becoming way too monotonous for a computer hobbyist such as myself. I felt pigeonholed in a production job, and what I really wanted to do was learn more about web servers and the Internet. Once I realized that CurtCo wasn't the place for that I began looking for other opportunities at local Internet Service Providers (ISPs). After a couple of interviews I eventually landed a job as a web developer at Unlimited Fiber Output where the owner Edward S. Kim (who was short-staffed at the time) was glad to offer up the opportunity for me to work on servers and ISP infrastructure.

The company was located in one of the high-rises in downtown Los Angeles with ample floor space for staff and a state-of-the-art data center. In fact Unlimited Fiber Output was a fully operational Internet Service Provider or as the owner liked to call it Internet Solution Provider, because the company had much more to offer than just Internet data service.

The Unlimited Fiber Output network itself consisted of a dozen internal and co-located servers running services such as DNS, MAIL, WEB, FTP, RADIUS, NEWS, etc. and some carrier grade Frame-Relay/ATM switches, routers, corporate and customer Remote Access servers, Internet Telephony Gateways, Lucent Merlin Phone System, LAN workstations, as well as routers located at end-user sites.

In the beginning my job was to make web sites for clients and manage dial-up user accounts on the Remote Access Service (RAS) server. A few months after I joined the company, my new friend David C. Lin who was the network administrator at the time announced that he found a better paying job at Cisco Systems in San Jose and that he was moving back to the Bay area. By then I knew a lot more about which equipment did what function and how the systems were configured, but the announcement still came as a surprise. After a couple weeks of intense training I ended up assuming the role of the I.T. Manager. After that point my primary job was no longer making web sites, but to maintain the Internet backbone, deploy servers and applications, and lastly to develop web sites and web applications.

Managing the data center included taking care of a dozen or so Internet servers and access devices such as the Ascend Cascade 8000 and 9000 carrier grade ATM switches, the Cisco 7505 IP backbone router, the Cisco PIX firewall, some U.S. Robotics Total Control Dial-Up servers, and a bunch of Pipeline ISDN, Osicom T1 end user routers, and CSU/DSUs. The actual day-to-day activities consisted of running regular backups, provisioning new clients, supporting existing clients, network wiring, writing service provisioning software, creating network maps and documentation, maintaining Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for multi-site client operations, and also the testing and installation of International Internet Telephony Gateways for telecommunications company voice exchange purposes.

Besides network administration there were also web development and programming tasks to take care of as well as a host of miscellaneous business administration duties which included writing up proposals and quotations, analyzing competitors, pricing products and services, and supporting sales people with technical issues.