Outlan
The personal site of Michael J. Martin — network and network security architect, author, and advisor. Outlan is also the name of my Substack, where I write what I actually think, not what a client wants to hear. Too many companies treat security like a bet they're hoping not to lose.
Latest Dispatches
Pick Any Two, Revisited
The CAP theorem from the network side of the wire, and the CAP choices your network is already making.
Read → No. 009 · Field NotesBandwidth Is Not Throughput
The link has a speed. The path has a throughput. A lab with a known answer, and five tools measured against it.
Read → No. 008 · Field NotesThe Packet Doesn't Lie
Reading tcpdump filters byte by byte, and the 20-byte assumption that breaks the classic recipes.
Read →On the Site
Getting Started in Network Security
The courses I point people to when they ask where to start: Linux, networking, security fundamentals, firewalls and IDS/IPS. Mostly free.
Course list → HistoryThe Oddities Emporium
Artifacts from a career that started in 1991. First up: my old SearchNetworking "Router Expert" columnist page, circa 2002.
Dig in → ShirtsWearable Opinions for Network People
Shirts for people who have explained latency to a vice president more than once.
See the shirts →Speaking
Past · Panel →About
I started in 1991 at Regeneron, in biotech, building thin-coax ARCnet and Ethernet LANs, running Netware, and setting up dial-up TCP/IP internet access — along with the direct internet connections, internet mail, and the LAN, WAN, and user systems that came with it. The unglamorous plumbing everything else depends on. The timing turned out to be a stroke of luck more than a plan, because it put me right at the start of the modern internet. Firewalls when they were still a new idea. The U.S. Internet backbone taking shape. At Advanced Networks and Services, which helped run that early backbone and built AOL's dial-up network, I got to be part of the dawn of commercial web hosting — I ended up supporting the hosting for McGraw-Hill's entire magazine catalog at one point, which felt like a big deal at the time and, in hindsight, mostly taught me how much I still had to learn. Later, at Edgix, I did early content delivery, caching, and acceleration work, back when all of it was still being invented as we went, not bought off a shelf.
From there the path wandered a bit — a handful of local and regional ISPs, a stretch in consumer electronics at Philips. Along the way I picked up systems and storage alongside networking and security, on real hardware and real operating systems — AIX, Solaris, Linux, BSDI, even Apple's UNIX before OS X existed. I'm told that makes me "full-stack" now. I just thought of it as doing the job.
In 2001, in the wake of the dot-bomb, after the latest startup went bust, I landed a job at McKinsey & Company — I had no idea at all what they actually did. I started out on the internal side, supporting the Firm itself, and — like a lot of technologists there — ended up, 24 years later, supporting both the Firm and its clients, mostly educating the uninitiated in the net-sec arts: that zero trust is not a product, that identity is genderless, and that if you can't see it or measure it, you really can't secure it. Hope is not a strategy. And just because you can doesn't mean you should. My approach never really changed the whole time: if my mother could understand what I was proposing, my clients probably could too. These days I work in network security engineering and help out a few technology companies as an advisor.
I'm grateful for all of it. It's a strange career to sum up in a bio, and I'm not sure I've fully managed it here — but it's the reason I have opinions worth reading, and why I started writing them down.
About the name: OUT + LAN, one letter short of Outland (1981) — the lone marshal on Io who stands up to the company. Seemed fitting.
Book & Writing
I wrote Understanding the Network: A Practical Guide to Internetworking (New Riders, 2000) mostly because nobody else seemed to actually understand networking well enough to explain it — most books at the time were either textbooks or training manuals. I also wrote the monthly "Router Expert" column for SearchNetworking.com, which is still floating around out there — here's the proof — and did a few podcasts on security, SD-WAN, and automation along the way.
Papers
Longer-form technical papers, with citations, on network and network security architecture.
Contact
For inquiries: netman0u812@outlan.net
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed here are mine, and mine alone. They do not reflect the views or positions of any company or organization I am, or have been, associated with in any way. I am solely responsible for any errors or inaccuracies in this work.