Kia Ora,

I've lurked around here a bit and thought I should introduce myself.  I'm Ben otherwise known as Portunus - my first computer was a Commodore 64 which I later got a modem for.  Started calling BBS's around 1989 and later ran a BBS in Auckland called PLCBCS or "Portunus's Little Computer Based Conversation System" from 92-96.  In it's later days it had 4 phone lines which was pretty flash back then!

I work at Auckland University of Technology in the technology services department - my main job is looking after our telephone system which is currently Cisco Call Manager 4.1 with approx 2200 VoIP phones and 500 analog ports (and growing all the time!).  As well as a 3rd party voicemail and call queing system I have been experimenting with Asterisk with the view to gradually using it for more stuff.  Also I have been involved in some of AUT's initial use of KAREN - which if you haven't heard of is NZ's Advanced Research and Education network - NZ's version of USA's Internet2/Abilene network.  A network so fast you can't saturate it is most geek's dream I would think!

Outside work I'm still a geek, love setting up FreeBSD to be a squid cache/dns cache/samba and the like.  Run Asterisk at home and have a voip household.  My current geek interests are networking and VoIP, I have gradually been getting better on the Cisco IOS side of stuff - want to learn more of course.

cheers,
ben.