Jeffrey Wilson
Network Architect & Automation Engineer
BGP Operations & Incident Response
Diagnosed campus-wide CDN loss as an inbound traffic-steering prefix leak overnight, sent a cold email to a Google network engineer at 8:40am day 2, and had confirmation in hand before the war room reconvened: restored service via peer shutdown within minutes. Followed with RPKI/ROA registration and a permanent BGP advertisement redesign that eliminates the leak vector class. Multihomed ISP policy, RTBH, uRPF, and carrier WAN boundary design across a 20-year arc.
Network Automation
Built production automation across the full threat response lifecycle — RTBH blackhole injection via iBGP, email parsing, and Quagga CLI wrapping — replacing a multi-step approval workflow with a single-operator paste operation. Authored a TextFSM template corpus against five OS families with preflight coverage reporting and per-site gap analysis. Splunk, Palo Alto, CA Spectrum, and DHCP telemetry pipelines built in Perl and Python; homegrown NMS/IPAM validated by commercial replacement on departure.
Campus Fabric Architecture
Enforced NNI-only core boundary on the 2024 campus overhaul against organizational pushback — held design position through completion on the basis that collapsing edge ports onto core merges failure domains and destroys deterministic troubleshooting. Guided distribution-layer VRF design and provided architectural clarity on isolated FIB sharing a common SPBM backbone. Consolidated the LEARN provider boundary in 2023 by learning IOS-XR l2transport to collapse a discrete L2 breakout switch into ASR subinterfaces — eliminated dedicated hardware, reduced capex, and cleaned the provider handoff stack.
Cross-Domain Authority
Owned the baylor.edu identity and HTTP architecture for 15 years — Palo NAT, F5 iRules, DNS, and SSL SAN cert stack — across four teams with no organizational mandate over any of them. Execution ran on reputation and trust; architecture scaled from 16K to 20K students and 1G to 2x10G ISP handoff without redesign. Personally built and operated F5 BigIP LTM configuration for years before a dedicated specialist was hired; retained architectural lead on novel point solutions even after the specialist came aboard.
Observability
Built a multi-source Grafana stack at zero budget and own initiative: Statseeker, Palo Alto HA pair session counts, DHCP pool utilization, and CA Spectrum asset data — all correlated in InfluxDB via custom Perl pipelines. Session count color-coding detected unexpected HA failover events five to six times over five years. DHCP pool alerting triggered wireless admin rebalancing workflow before client impact.
Overlay Networking
Network architecture advisor on NSX-v deployment and subsequent NSX-T transformation; SME for VXLAN-to-Geneve encapsulation migration and underlay implications. Led brownfield discovery and design-artifact generation for a multi-state hospital fabric upgrade targeting Cisco replacement — identified root cause of a production outage at the SPBM/Cisco boundary before either vendor team did.
Selected Writing
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Are These Actually the Same Rules? A CheckPoint-to-Palo-Alto Migration Audit
Two firewalls that both call something “the address at 10.4.x.x” are not saying the same thing, if one of them stores that address as an object called dns-primary and the other stores it as a signed 32-bit integer with no name attached at all. Before anyone can ask whether a migration preserved the rulebase, both…
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A Hit Counter Doesn’t Know When It Started Counting
A rule that has matched nothing in nine minutes and a rule that has matched nothing in eighty days look exactly the same in the output. I wrote about that moment on LinkedIn; this post goes deeper into the toolchain around that observation: three small Perl tools written to consolidate a set of independently managed…
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How Retiring One System Retired Another
The Wireless Gateway’s End Also Killed CheckPoint’s Cleartext Login One component retired. It killed an entire system on its way out. I only built one of them. Before wifi, Baylor’s residential network ran authentication through CheckPoint using a cleartext, telnet-emulated login. I’d already shipped client software for both Windows and Mac System 7 that talked…