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
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.
Making pfSense the front door to my LAN over Tailscale
I moved remote network access off a DNS box and onto the firewall where it belongs, hit a pfSense package bug that silently failed to apply a setting, and tightened access down to exactly who needs what.
// /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
When Tailscale breaks your LAN host's gateway
Building next
Network automation toolkit: Ansible playbooks for LXC bootstrap, nginx vhosts, Pi-hole DNS sync, and TLS cert distribution.