Jarod

Network Engineer in Nashville, TN

Eight years in IT, most of them at MSPs, now moving into an in-house role supporting live entertainment venues. I work mostly in Fortinet networks, and I learn by building labs and writing down what I find.

Done or running In progress Planned

Notable wins

  1. Restored wireless access for 100+ users within an hour

    Production wireless network, Oct 2026

    Ended a weekend-long outage for 100+ users about one hour after starting on it.

    How it went
    Problem
    After an SSID was moved to bridge mode, it was tagged with the wrong VLAN. Clients connected but never received DHCP leases, and the network was down all weekend.
    What I did
    Led the troubleshooting, traced the failure to the VLAN assignment on the bridged SSID and corrected it.
    • Wireless
    • VLANs
    • DHCP
    • Root-cause analysis

  2. Ended a complete network outage at a medical facility

    Medical facility network with 14 managed FortiSwitches

    Restored service to all 14 switches and brought the whole facility back online.

    How it went
    Problem
    All 14 FortiSwitches dropped off FortiLink and the facility lost its network entirely.
    What I did
    Diagnosed the cause as a firmware bug, then worked through the FortiLink and CAPWAP state on each switch to bring them back under firewall management.
    • FortiGate
    • FortiSwitch
    • FortiLink
    • Root-cause analysis

  3. Found the real cause of slow internet at headquarters

    Dual-circuit SD-WAN site

    Proved an ISP provisioning fault and delivered a fix plan with weighted balancing and traffic segmentation.

    How it went
    Problem
    Users saw inconsistent speeds under 100 Mbps.
    What I did
    Used SD-WAN health checks to show one circuit running near 5 Mbps with jitter over the SLA threshold, and found traffic was being balanced evenly across two very different circuits.
    • SD-WAN
    • FortiGate
    • ISP escalation

  4. Fixed a site-to-site VPN that refused to pass traffic

    Two-site FortiGate IPsec tunnel

    Brought the tunnel up with matching selectors on both sides.

    How it went
    Problem
    The tunnel kept logging "no policy configured" IKE errors.
    What I did
    Compared the phase 2 selector configs on both firewalls and corrected the mismatch.
    • IPsec VPN
    • FortiGate
    • IKE troubleshooting

  5. Wrote the playbook for zero-downtime SSO certificate renewals

    Salesforce SSO through Microsoft Entra ID

    Turned renewals into a repeatable procedure anyone on the team can follow without an outage.

    How it went
    Problem
    SAML certificate renewals were a manual, risky process with no written procedure.
    What I did
    Mapped which certificate lives where, designed a pre-stage then cutover approach, and wrote an SOP plus a script and KB article for CRT to PFX conversion.
    • SAML SSO
    • Entra ID
    • Salesforce
    • Documentation

  6. Rolled out OneDrive folder backup to every managed device

    Microsoft 365 and Intune environment

    Folder backup enabled across managed devices without users having to sign in or do anything.

    How it went
    Problem
    User folders were not consistently backed up to OneDrive.
    What I did
    Deployed Known Folder Move and silent account setup through the Intune Settings Catalog, staged through pilot and exclusion groups.
    • Intune
    • Microsoft 365
    • Entra ID

Certifications

Lab projects

Skills

Firewalls and VPN
FortiGate, SD-WAN, IPsec VPN, FSSO, Firewall policy
Switching and wireless
FortiSwitch, FortiAP, UniFi, Cisco IOS, VLANs, Wi-Fi tuning
Identity and endpoints
Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Intune, SAML SSO
Platforms
Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora), Windows, Proxmox, Docker, AWS
Learning now
Python, Ansible, Netmiko