As network architect for video game tournament organizer the Cyberathlete Professional League, Brad Wernicke connects players to their virtual battlegrounds.
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Ever had a nightmare in which you’ve been pulling cable or fixing bug-infested user desktops for days on end? Then you can well imagine what Brad Wernicke goes through as network operations director for the Cyberathlete Professional League.
Wernicke lives that dream – not a nightmare for him – each time the CPL hosts one of its popular video game competitions. For seven non-stop days, Wernicke leads a team of 30 or so paid and volunteer workers in building and managing multiple LANs and fixing software quirks on untold numbers and types of user computers. The pace is grueling, but Wernicke doesn’t mind. Working for the CPL brings together two of his lifelong passions – IT and video gaming.
This week, for example, finds Wernicke at the posh new Gaylord Texan in Grapevine, Texas, site of the CPL’s Cyberathlete Extreme World Championship. The summer extravaganza draws hundreds of competitors, vying for tournament purses ranging from $25,000 to $100,000, and thousands of onlookers.
For an event such as this, Wernicke and his team typically get 48 hours to build five 100M bit/sec LANs – one for the competition, one for the thousands of attendees who want to play games while at the event, one for the CPL’s sponsor vendors, another for the media and a final one for registration. At the Gaylord Texan, setting up the five LANs means running 100,000 feet of Ethernet cable over 105,000 square feet of exhibition space, installing Cisco and Netgear switches and access points (for wireless networking), and providing access to thousands of users.
On the 100M competition LAN, Wernicke hooks up CPL-provided user machines – battle stations, if you will. These are custom-built Intel Pentium 4-based computers running Windows XP Professional and outfitted with Nvidia video and ADI sound cards. Competitors can bring in their own mice and keyboards, but otherwise the systems are “even-steven,” he says.
Wernicke doesn’t allow Internet connectivity from this LAN, fearing for the network’s stability. “If the network crashes, we’ve got to restart the match. That hasn’t happened since I’ve been running the network,” he says.
The second LAN, for the event’s popular Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) area, presents a bigger challenge. Registered attendees can hook their computers into this LAN to play with other gamers or, in the case of those attendees who also are competing in the championship games, to practice and scrimmage between matches. “When the BYOC opens, we literally have 2,500 people at the door with their systems,” Wernicke says. “And some of these people will play 24 hours a day.”
Like the tournament LAN, the BYOC network is straightforward enough – 100M bit/sec to each user station. Because the CPL allows high-speed Internet access from this network, Wernicke also uses a Linux-based firewall to monitor incoming traffic. But viruses are a problem, he says. The CPL cannot dictate software use, including anti-virus protection, for the BYOC PCs because checking for compliance on thousands of machines is time-prohibitive, Wernicke says. Instead, he hammers home the anti-virus message in pre-event e-mails to registered attendees. Still, some don’t take proper precautions. They either hook already infected PCs into the BYOC, or pick up a bug during the tournament because they’re not running anti-virus software. “For every event, we spend the first day or two cleaning up the BYOC network,” he says.
When the competition opens, Wernicke and his team spend their time trouble-shooting and supporting the gamers and other users. If there’s a downside to Wernicke’s week on the road, it’s that he doesn’t get any time to play himself.
Wernicke began video-gaming at 8, on his Atari 2600, and confesses to having owned just about every video-game system made since. His list includes the Atari 5200 and 7800 models, Colecovision, Intellivision and, today, PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and Xbox.
Xbox’s game selection has made that system his current favorite, Wernicke says. “It offers titles the whole family can enjoy,” such as the Tetris and Dr. Mario games he plays with his wife, and the Madden NFL series he enjoys with his 14-year-old son.
Wernicke’s exposure to computers began with Atari, as well. When he was 13, he got an Atari 400. Soon thereafter, Wernicke began running a bulletin board service out of his parents’ basement. Naturally, it was slated toward games. “That’s about all you could do on an Atari,” he says.
Wernicke didn’t leave his tinkering to his home system. As a 16-year-old, he wrote an inventory application for the video store’s CP/M-based Kaypro machine. By the time he was in his late 20s, the self-taught Wernicke had parlayed a sales position into programming work on IBM System/34, S/36, S/38 and AS400 minicomputers.
Fifteen years into his programming career, Wernicke decided he was ready for a new challenge. Joining a consulting firm, he added LAN, WAN and telephony expertise to his résumé. And, with the Internet’s rise as a commercial medium in the mid-1990s, he launched a series of gaming Web sites. That effort started as a hobby – “I wanted to learn how to program on the Internet,” says Wernicke, noting that he gained an insider’s knowledge of C, HTML, Linux, MySQL and Perl while working on those sites.
Wernicke’s gaming sites caught the eye of his current boss, Angel Munoz, president of the CPL. At the time, Munoz was running Adrenaline Vault, a site that complemented the information Wernicke was providing through his gaming network. By 1998, when Munoz decided to form a professional gamers’ league, Wernicke had sold off his own gaming sites and was eager to take on minor projects for the CPL.
That led to his current gig as network operations director, a part-time role he took on two years ago. When Wernicke is not networking the CPL events, he spends about 20 hours per week managing the CPL’s Web site, helping to coordinate event logistics and handling miscellaneous other IT issues at the highly dispersed organization. Wernicke, like all other CPL employees, works from his home. And you could consider this a night job. He still works full time during the day as technical services and communications manager for Chamberlain Group, Elmhurst, Ill. He uses vacation days to oversee the competition networks.
Wernicke couldn’t be happier. “I love this job,” he says. “I know no one else able to do this.”
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