Who here works in technology?

[Skyjunky]

IT Director

[AtTheWall]

Here. Software director of a web development team.

And BigL is very good at SQL development, change management, Technology Staff management, hammering tough development project timelines and has earned a lot of coin and respect in the Charles Schwab organization!

He also knows a lot about Broker\Dealer operations, Call Center operations in support of Stock Exchange trades and he's not too shabby at watching the Market and hammering trade executions when it's time to hit CLICK!

He's also very savvy at the immensely proprietary, ECN feeds, market data information, riding across dedicated VPN frames from the New York and Chicago stock exchange networks.

He can tune a production SQL server to run like a scalded cat, with historical writes to a back-end historical server....without missing a query.

He's full of talent......probably forgot some of that old VB and C++ stuff from our yester years, but i bet he can still remember a lot of it today?

We both worked a .COM start-up, that was previously known in Austin as CyberCorp.com. During 2003, we pulled more Internet traffic, in the entire State of Texas, during Nasdaq Market open - first hour, and the last hour of the trading day, than any other business in Texas. Radio Shack, Compaq in H-Town, Dell in Austin...none of them even came close. We had the senior Executives at Dell on speed dial, and Cisco and Intel would dump gear at our shop, to run load test data on hardware, that had yet to be released to the general public. NIC's tuned by Intel, to support the data load we we polling during our trade periods.

We ordered servers by the 18 wheeler full, getting everyone involved with unloading these servers on pallets and staging them in our data center. We had to record and catalog all phone calls and trade market data onto CDROM, and this information had to be electronically available for 7 straight years. The pressure to deliver, and stay in good standing with the SEC was at a premium. I had to deal with these SEC guys every year. My self and our lawyer sat in a room and I answered questions, non-stop, keeping us in good standing with the Feds. They sent their hot shots in, all of them versed in various facets of IT Operations and their entire goal, was to find weakness and non-compliance to their tight regulations. It was brutal, but I learned a ton during this period.

Dealt with the ILoveYou virus, the SQL Slammer worm......and sat through software audits with the BSA. It was seriously a nerve wracking, super fast paced, work environment.

We've hammered beers and gobbled pizza when we hit Trading records...knocking out 60,000 trades at $14.95 a pop. During this time frame, a standard DS3 circuit ran $75,000 dollars per month! My IT budget was running around 1.6 million dollars and we supported 1500 servers, in support of Day Trading activity around the USA.

Both of us got sucked into the Charles Schwab acquisition, and both of immediately received raises that are hard for me to realize, how lucky we were during this small period in Internet history.

At CyperCorp we played CounterStike and Halflife on the Corporate network, hosting a CounterStrike server on Friday night and on into the wee hours of Saturday morning, playing 1st person shooter video games over our huge Internet pipe. We formed a clan, drove to Dallas with the then new Flat panel monitors, custom game PCs and played in the CyberAtheleticLeague tournament (CPL). We had a developer build a CounterStrike map that mirrored our building....all 3 floors. The CEO (Hack) was a hostage sitting at his desk LOL! Oh man those were fun times.

These were really our glory days. The days before VoIP, the days before solid SAN storage solutions, when WIFI first started to hit the business community.

Texasbowhunter.com was in her early years. Face book, My Space and You Tube were non-existent, and many of us had to host our own personal Internet registrations, to share photos and hunting videos on the Internet.

Heck, there was a period where I helped work through some TBH database issues here.

Legdog and I even killed the TBH server, pouring hundreds of photos on the site, in a pixel war LOL!

Darn good times during a very interesting period in American ECommerce history!

Leland...I really miss working with you Brother! We went through some serious good times, and the memories will always be at the forefront of my professional IT career.

[justletmein]

Me. Mostly VMware and Blade Systems but end up doing a lot of residual Winders and Linux stuff just out of necessity.

[AtTheWall]

Scenes at CyberCorp.com early 2000s....probably 2003 or so.

Surfing TBH from inside the Data Center


The Database farm...much of BigL's code is riding inside these racks. Our first SAN, a XIOTech chassis pair, house SQL trade data. We moved out of this into Hitachi a bit further into the SAN evolution.

A pair of high dollar, 4 proc Dell 8 U's are running in the lower right, next to the Xiotech to the left.
SQL 2000 cost $10,000 bucks per CPU then. That's $80,000 bucks in SQL alone, nested inside thee 2 servers. The server chassis from Dell, went over 15k a pop! Heck, the cost of this scene alone is big bucks. We had literally 3 rows of servers to the right of this spot. Each one filled to the hilt with 2 U Dell 2450 servers. Multi-homed and running in production and hot standby. 50 TONS of A/C kept this farm cool and our battery backup was downstairs, literally taking up a huge footprint in the lowest portion of this building. A huge Cat diesel generation sat outside just to the left of this scene. My office was about 20 ft from this spot, BigL was about 50ft behind me in this shot.


Core routers and switches, VLAN segmentation with multiple subnets in support of 1500 servers, 200 employees and 5,000+ clients. Mixed in this circus, are ECN market feed frames, many of them fractional or full frame T1s. All encrypted and running proprietary ECN protocols, encapsulated within their respective IP packets. Each feed, required big money for real-time market data information. Cisco ASA firewalls were so new, we had ASA cards stuffed inside our premise routers.

Before the Feds outlawed HONEYPOTS, we would stick a couple of Dell boxes up inside our DMZ and run BLACKICE to troll hackers, who were targeting our network. Once we had a lock on one of these clowns, we would wait till the market shut down, and then we would point about 20 or 30 servers at their Public IP and blast them with 166Mbs of dedicated Internet backbone. A massive DOS attack, taking them off net till we shut down our attack

Other times we would give them access to a network printer LOL! Oh man, the cheap crap we did then to pass the time and hammer these clowns!


We hired a couple of California, day trade hot shots, who traded millionaire dollars on the stock market, using our software - CYBERTRADER. This was a first time anyone in the Stock trade community attempted to provide real-time, voice\data collaboration sharing screens of what these guys did, speaking in a classroom mode, to a select group of traders. This was years before Citrix and GoToMeeting, or GoToMyPC etc.. Sharing screen and voice data was a real challenge and this 2 person layout, where these guys sat (STUDIO) required me to get creative in displaying these screens and segmenting their traffic out of eating up portions of our Corporate bandwidth. I forgot how many Dell PCs I had stuck into this studio to get this thing hot, but...we pulled it off!

If memory serves me correctly, each one of these first generation flat panels ran around 2k per pop. Money was no object, when making more money and earning new clients was the goal. A smart and successful trader continues to trade. It's a full blown job, many waking at 3 am to research before the market opened. We even supported dedicated point to point networks, to some of our more prominent clients. We also supported dedicated frame circuits, to day trading shops, willing to use our software and paying for real time, and real fast, stock market feed data.

What I would have payed to have a truly virtualized infrastructure during these years!

Note the NEXTEL on the belt LOL! We all had Nextel's and lunches in Austin, one would chirp, and everyone would grab their NEXTEL to check

The TV's, tuned to market research feeds....these were the days right before the big screen flat panel screens hit the street.

[rickgarcia76]

Operations Manager, Computer Forensics

[DRettele]

Been in IT for 25+ yrs. Started at the bottom doing network Admin stuff. Currently VP of Operations for a cloud startup in Austin.

[FCoDxDart]

Sr Network Tech II semi retired TAMU

Do you know Trez Jones?

[TXBlueEyes]

Good stuff. Keep it coming! I've always enjoyed the "Hey oil guys!!" thread, so I thought we could get a Hey Tech Guys!! thread going to get us though the off season.

and one girl. I'm use to it. :-)

[44mAG]

Test Engineer for a semi conductor company in Austin.

[dpatterson1976]

Been in IT since I was 21. Im 39 now and a Network Engineer for Suddenlink Communications.

[Jtrage]

I fake it everyday

Have you ever read the Tales of IT? I think it was originally on 4chan but has made its rounds on the internet. It has bad language but is hilarious. Basically a guy faking it.

[Tommyh]

18 years in IT here. migrating to project management more and more as of late. pretty fun change!

[nando]

Yes.

[WCB]

I work with radios. sorta...

Microwave up/down converters. Anything up to 40 GHz and occasionally up to 60 GHz.

Freq measuring receivers are my bread and butter right now.

[kgrutzmacher]

Started in IT out of A&M and I guess I have made a 25 year career of it – so far. Cut my teeth on the first Cisco AGS+ routers and still remember waiting for the boxes of documentation that came with each one. Since then, I have performed major network conversions, rode out the Worldcom multiday frame relay outage, moved multiple DCs and keep the bits flowing – mostly. I have been with just three companies and I am currently responsible for the global network of an OFS that was just in the news yesterday. We are hunkering down and shedding costs to ride out this crude madness. I’ve been through a few of these but this one could get even uglier. Just cleaned out a cube today of a hoarder of old equipment here are work. It is really amazing how technology has changed over my 1st 25 years. Old hard drives, backup tapes, floppies and RS-232 kits all went in the trash bin.