Welcome to the Dembowski.net Consulting home Page. 

Dembowski.net is the home of three brothers who all work in different areas related to the Internet. 

The majority of our work has been related to firewall's, IP routing w/UNIX based servers, and mail systems of different types (SMTP connectivity).

Around 1994 the forces of the universe conspired to change my method of employment from a regular salaried employee to a paid by the hour consultant.  This has various pros and cons. 

My main interest for a long time has been IP networking.  This naturally led to my getting very involved firewalls such as the TIS Firewall Tool kit, Checkpoint Firewall-1, and Gauntlet. 

It also meant that I got involved in UNIX and variant operating systems such as Linux.  When I got involved in Intel based UNIX all that was available at that time was SCO.  That system had a Digiboard and 15 WYSE-50 terminals.  The support from SCO was "we don't support that hardware.  Buy a real computer and than call us back."  So when my brother Ed introduced me to Slackware Linux I was dubious.  The operating system at that time was 0.99pl11!  But it worked with our hardware and was more UNIX than SCO (IMHO). 

I've been using Linux for several years now.  I've moved from Slackware to RedHat because the package management was superior, now I just stay because I've gotten used to the setup.  This box is running RedHat 6.1 and handles our e-mail and web page.  It's running on a 300 Mhz PII.  It is an excellent example of what people mean when the say the Linux extends the life of hardware.

9/9/2000 Well that didn’t last very long. About 59 days after becoming a full time employee at Salomon Smith Barney I decided that this was not for me and returned to a paid by the hour consultant. I am now working at Deutsche Bank in the World Trade Center area in the firewall group. This was an interesting transition because my old employer has the best infrastructure I have ever seen! The technology that there Network Engineering implements and the scale that they work in is impressive to put it mildly. Perhaps I can someday return as a consultant; one can hope. A couple of weeks ago my family and I went to Puerto Rico. The last time my wife and I went was during a full-blown hurricane (Marylyn). Even though last time we spent a night in the lobby of our hotel I still had a good time visiting family and driving around San Juan. But my wife did not enjoy it and swore never to go back. Earlier this year we came up with an idea: why not go back with my folks? Every time they visit PR they go snorkeling, visit family, and have a pretty good time. So off we went. And naturally we hit hurricane Debby! It was just rain, but it prevented us from going snorkeling. We did get lots of time in San Juan and Dorado and everyone had a good time. Update my self-employed page. 5/21/2000 This page hasn't been updated in many a moon.  I've taken a full time position at Salomon Smith Barney as a Senior Network Engineer.  It's a good environment with good people. Last year Quake III Arena came out for the Win32 environment and naturally I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.  The basic premise is to hunt and massacre your opponents before they do the same to you.  It's not how long you can stay alive that counts but how many of "them" you can take with you. Around April I purchased a PIII 600Mhz motherboard.  It's about as cheap a motherboard as you can find (I intend to buy a Dell 1GHZ monster in the fall and wanted something to hold me over).  It does come with a single PCI slot, built in CMEDIA sound card, built in Ethernet, video, winmodem, USB, etc. The onboard video does NOT support opengl!  No Quake III Arena!  In a fit I ran out and bought a Voodoo3 3000 PCI card. This works great and so does Quake III Arena for Linux.  Now on my main box I never switch to Windows 98 except using VMWare.  This works out well for me since all I use Windows for is for Microsoft Office and Outlook 98.

Slashdot.org - A very cool source of information.  News for Nerds, Stuff that matters.  Freshmeat.net - Need the current version of some freely available UNIX based software?  Check here.  Kernelnotes.org - Get information and patches on the latest linux kernel. Lot's of links to interesting places. RedHat - They make a very fine Linux distribution.  I am getting concerned that they and Caldera are getting a little too commercial but my fears seem to be unwarranted. KDE - The K Desktop Environment.  Very cool, takes the pain and suffering out of configuring your X desktop.  GNOME is catching up, but not yet ready for prime time (IMHO).

Comments? Feel free to contact me.  Back to www.dembowski.net.