You: You Work Where?, 07/26/99

By JULIE BORT and DENI CONNOR
Network World, 7/26/99

Dilbert's got it wrong: All network managers are not stuffed into cubicles - and our extended search proves it. We surveyed thousands of Network World and Network World Fusion readers to find those of you who work in unusual places.

Here you'll find three of our favorites. The first is the regional government of Arctic Quebec's IS manager, who commutes to work on a snowmobile and services isolated communities via a twin-engine prop plane. The second is Breckenridge Resort's network manager, whose office window looks out onto downhill skiers carving S-turns. The third is an on-the-go military man who has crafted a WAN designed to be used anywhere - literally - in the world.

Choosing these three wasn't an easy task. They competed with hundreds of other prospects: network managers who work in flight-simulation facilities, radioactive chemical factories and NFL sports arenas, to name a few. It all goes to show: You're a fascinating bunch.

North star

The vastness of the Arctic exerts its own magnetic pull. The longer you're exposed to it, the more you feel its tug. It's an invitation to come learn the ways of the North's people, the Inuit, and plunge yourself into the wilderness, eat from its abundance, and sleep under its magical Northern Lights.

Certainly, David Birch, aka the Computer Guy of Nunavik, feels the attraction. "There is nowhere on Earth where I'd rather be," Birch says, shaking his head earnestly while speaking of Kuujjuaq (pronounced KEW-ju-ack), the largest city in the Nunavik region in Arctic Quebec. "It's the people and the land."

Figuratively, Kuujjuaq is the center of a cross, a place where contrasts meet. Despite its isolation from the south - about 895 miles from Montreal and only accessible by plane - Kuujjuaq is a modern city, a testament to the adaptability of the Inuit. With a population of 1,800, it is the largest Inuit settlement in the region. It sports three grocery stores, a hospital, a recreation center, TV and FM radio stations, multibedroom homes with cable TV and microwaves, and many an Internet connection. Astounding for a people who, a mere 50 years ago, lived in igloos.

Yet, the Inuit preserve their traditional ways. They teach Inuttitut as a first language, they hunt and fish for much of their food, they respect their elders, and they practice the first law of living in a harsh, unforgiving environment: Love thy brother. The combination of modern and traditional is summed up in the Inuit yin and yang: "nunalimmi" (community life) and "maqaivvimi" (life on the land). They work in the city and flee to the wilderness for camping in their time off.

Likewise, Kuujjuaq is at a physical crossroads. It's at the center of Nunavik, which stretches north from the 55th parallel to nearly the 63rd, across 200,000 square miles of usually frozen land.

Because Kuujjuaq is on the edge of the Arctic tree line - even a few miles north of town the land bears no trees - it has a ripe summer season in which temperatures average 55 F. Snow melts, ice turns to streams and lakes, grass greens, berries blossom. The nearby wilderness supports a breathtaking combination of dwarf spruce, birch and willows, and for hundreds of miles the ice on the tundra gives way to green, white and red moss and lichen. On the summer equinox, the sun shines some 21 hours per day.

Nunavik (which means "a place where you settle") is not to be confused with Nunavut ("our land"). The latter is the Inuit territory created by Canada in April; its boundary starts west of Nunavik. In contrast, Nunavik's Inuit regime, the Kativik Regional Government (KRG), has been around since the mid-1960s.

A department of one

Birch is the KRG's IS department. He handles a 23-server, 21-router network that links about 700 workstations across thousands of miles.

That network supports six agencies for 14 Inuit and three Cree Indian communities. Agencies include police, social welfare and legal. Across agencies, the KRG has a dozen different departments, such as purchasing and accounting, all of which are Birch's responsibility. Likewise, the bank, the Inuit landholding organization, the major airline (First Air/Air Inuit) and 98% of small businesses all ask for help from time to time. As the sole network guy, the gregarious Birch is PC technician, network designer, network administrator, e-mail administrator, buyer, the whole help desk and more.

But he's up to the task. A former independent network consultant, Birch has a broad technical background ranging from the sciences (physics and molecular biology) to certificates for Intel processors, Xerox repair and network equipment. He's as comfortable soldering several crashed Iomega ZIP drives to form a single working unit as he is setting up a secure server to give Web access to the legal department.

Moreover, he understands how important his work is. The network is one of the area's prime communication tools, and Birch wants it tuned to do even more.

"My vision is a completely integrated regionwide network that is distributing information to the people who really need it - the Inuit - in their own language," he says.

Specifically, he would like to build a star network that aggregates applications and databases by topic rather than community. The benefits could be tremendous. For instance, a single regionwide e-mail system could be programmed to alert search-and-rescue personnel remotely.

"If we were able to have a highly reliable network, a lot of tragedies could be avoided. Right now, getting a search team is done by shortwave radio. This is the North. Radios don't work well here, unless it's a very clear day. It can take hours to round people up," Birch says.

Likewise, a single database for the renewable resources department would offer applications to serve the people better. For instance, each community is allowed to hunt 15 beluga whales. With centralized management, a smaller community that needs only six whales can donate its remaining nine to a larger community, which may need those allotments to avoid starvation.

Such plans are a very Inuit way of weaving the modern world into a traditional lifestyle, although Birch wasn't born to the Inuit. Raised in Montreal, he moved to Kuujjuaq in 1992. Today, he's not only Nunavik's technical guru, but an accepted member of the community, happily married to an Inuit woman and father of two children who are being educated in the traditional ways.

"I love the lifestyle. If I have an extremely stressful day at the office, I can walk 15 minutes and I'm in the middle of the wilderness. In the summer, I can sit on a rock and listen to the birds. In the winter, everything is white and pure. It's beautiful, cleansing," he explains.

Infrastructure shortcomings

But if the wilderness is his greatest personal joy, it's also his professional bane. The obstacle is infrastructure. While the cities have paved streets, between communities lies ice, rivers, lakes and mountains, not roads. When not in Kuujjuaq, Birch can be found in a tiny twin-engine prop plane - the only access to the far-flung communities he supports.

Also absent are high-speed telecommunications. Within towns, Bell Canada offers 56K bit/sec plain old telephone service, but between them it only has 16.8K bit/sec satellite connections. "My main problem is slow-speed access to the rest of the planet," Birch says, frowning.

Not that it can't be done. For instance, the separate federal hospital system uses T-3 circuits between its Nunavik sites, one of which is down the road from the KRG building in Kuujjuaq. But because of security concerns, Birch has yet to get permission to piggyback his datacom traffic onto that nice fat pipe. ISDN is available in Kuujjuaq, but it is too costly for the KRG.

Still, Birch is a man who's seen many of his dreams realized and brought his community far into the technical age already. He's upgraded the KRG from the Apple LocalTalk network and nine ancient Macs it was using in 1992 to today's TCP/IP, 10/100 Ethernet network featuring Bay Networks routers, Windows NT Server 4.0 and several Pentium or PowerPC machines in every community.

As the Inuit say, "sivunivut niriunniqatsiapuq" - the future is full of hope.
- Julie Bort

Network mogul

They call it white gold, Colorado powder. It's snow so dry that you can scatter a 3-inch accumulation with a strong puff of breath. It's the ultimate downhill experience: soft and responsive. Fun? Sure. Also big business. Colorado powder calls 19 million people annually to the Rockies, more often than not to Breckenridge Ski Resort.

There, in a small administrative building on pine-covered Peak 8, is Ben Gilling's office. Gilling is the senior network specialist for Vail Resorts, Inc. (VRI), Colorado's largest resort operator, owner of Breckenridge, Beaver Creek, Keystone and Vail.

His desk butts up against a picture window that frames the Colorado Super Chair lift and snakelike skier traffic of Breckenridge's Crescendo and Springmeier runs. But on most days, you won't find the 6-foot-tall, athletic Gilling at his desk. He's out tending the switches at one of the resort's 20 networked locations or, if it's snowing, he's on the slopes.

"Skiing on a great powder morning is nirvana. One of the great perks of my job is that I can take advantage of that," the 34-year-old says in an even, thoughtful voice that reverberates slightly with a Kansas City twang.

Pass the credit card

Gilling's is a job that has it all: intense beauty, incredible year-round perks and a state-of-the-art switched network packed with challenges.

The VRI network spans more than 100 miles, from Denver to Avon, a city just west of Vail. Gilling is responsible for the Breckenridge arm, a complex mixture of wireless technology, more than 40 Novell servers on switched Ethernet LANs (plus three IBM AS/400s) and various WAN services, including ATM, frame relay and T-1.

"One of the biggest misconceptions people have about my job is that it's Podunk. That's not true. Our network is as sophisticated as any Fortune 1000 company's. We have a switched platform and a 100M backbone between products," he says.

More than that, the network is Breckenridge's financial lifeblood, controlling ticket sales, the ski school and restaurants. It also handles some rather sophisticated applications, such as a system that turns a season pass into a credit card that guests can use to buy food and goods at any VRI resort, or the wireless ticket validation service used by ski lift operators.

Another misconception Gilling finds is that he has summers off. It's really quite the opposite. As cold gives way to warmth, skiing gives way to mountain biking. At Breckenridge, guests use the lifts to take their bikes to the top and ride the steep grassy slopes down. Last year, Breckenridge even hosted televised downhill races for the National Off-Road Bicycle Association.

Breckenridge also opens a "summer fun park," which has an Alpine slide, a maze and miniature golf. All need the network for ticket sales and tracking.

Spring is all the time Gilling has to plan and test new projects. With the fall comes 12- to 16-hour days of getting ready to receive the winter guests. Those long days are filled with implementing and testing all major switch, cabling, server and wireless upgrades - not to mention bargaining with US West, the only infrastructure vendor serving the mountains.

Downhill desires

Still, the serious and confident network manager says, this was a job to which he aspired. Five years ago, he left a high-paying sales engineer position at a Houston system integrator and headed for the mountains. He worked for a year at a low-paying front-desk position before landing in MIS as a PC technician. From there, ambition and good ideas moved him steadily up into network management.

"I'd describe myself as a corporate dropout. I wasn't really satisfied with the work I was doing in Houston. It has always been a dream to live in the mountains and be a ski bum. Vail is still a large corporation, so we have a corporate environment, but with a mountain twist," he says, smiling.
- Julie Bort

Moving man

The hot desert wind is blowing at 45 mph, whipping up sand and dirt. Visibility is 50 feet, and a haboob - the weather condition the Bedouin call the "worst possible of things" - is bearing down fast. It's a brown thunderstorm that showers walls of mud-laden water as it passes.

Imagine, as Sgt. 1st Class Kevin Young has had to do, what it would be like to build and maintain a WAN that could operate in such an environment - actually, in any environment, anywhere in the world. That's just the assignment the Army two years ago handed to Young, who had gained some network experience while serving for 15 years in Special Forces and light infantry. His specific marching orders were to put together a network for the 4th Infantry Division, 1st "Raider" Brigade that could be set up and configured easily, and torn down just as quickly when ground troops moved to new battle positions.

The WAN would be part of the Army's Force XXI war-fighting experiments to improve battlefield performance with digital technology. And it would ultimately be used in combat.

After getting this assignment, Young gathered together 13 other enlisted men and women from the Raider Brigade. The team, with the assistance of government contractors such as Mitre, came up with a network designed for quick assembly and disassembly.

The WAN is ready for action. And here's how it will be set up, whether running on base, in the field for training exercises or at the battlefront.

Central to the design is the LAN Management Vehicle (LMV), a Humvee outfitted with a Sun SPARC-20 server and up to 125 case-hardened Unix workstations connected with 10M bit/sec Ethernet. These machines are joined to workstations in other vehicles via Cisco routers and coaxial or fiber-optic cable, forming a WAN that covers a swath of land 37 miles wide. Another WAN, similarly configured, takes over control of the next geographic location. The WANs are all linked.

Each workstation on the WAN performs a different task. Some display maps for determining troop positions. Others track weather or enemy troop movements. Still others take satellite information that will be used to tell tanks what to do. Each vehicle contains a similar setup.

High-tech battlefield

In battle, the WANs will be situated in the rear under camouflage tarps. Vehicles equipped with LAN equipment at the front will transmit troop positions, report enemy fire or call for help to the main WANs via two-wire X.25 or radio links. Using information coming into the WANs, brigade commanders will direct operations, attacks and troop movements.

When the troops move, so will the WANs. That will mean closing down all LAN applications, severing the WAN connections, coiling the cable and falling in line behind the advancing tanks. At the new position, the WAN will need to be re-established at once. Young says training exercises have shown that it takes 24 16-oz. cans of compressed air per day to keep the WAN equipment clean.

"The WAN will be the heart of the whole operation," says Young, with an accent particular to this area of central Texas. "That's why it's so important that my guys have to be good at what they do. They have to be able to troubleshoot something in their mind, know what it is and get it fixed, up and running - now."

In his office at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas, the country's largest Army base, Young sits in fatigues, looking comfortable in the 90-degree heat as he talks animatedly about the WAN. The 46-year-old is a mixture of genteel Southern gentleman and a down-home good ol' boy, comfortable fiddling with computers and building Web pages.

"You have to have it in your heart to do things like this," says Young, who passed up retirement so he could get his replacement trained.
- Deni Connor

You: Your life in five
Where will you be in five years? Network World, 7/26/99.

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At a handful of high-tech companies, four-legged friends help brighten the daily routine. Network World, 3/15/99.

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Network World, 3/01/99.

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Preparing the on-board network for the International Space Station. Network World, 2/01/99.

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