Mark Prior Email & Phone Number

Adelaide, Australia

Independent Telecommunications consultancy, specializing in ISP backbone engineering, routing information management using IRR, and IPv6.I have also conducted multi-day workshops in Routing and Internet Exchange design and operation to Internet engineers across the Asia Pacific region. These workshops consisted of a series of lectures on the topics as well as hands-on practical lab sessions using virtualised Cisco routers (Dynamips).I have some experience with managing services on macOS, Debian and Ubuntu systems, such as apache, bind, and postfix. I have deployed HTTPS on my web site and DNSSEC on my domains.I developed and maintain a Perl script that collects information on the status of IPv6 deployment across a core set of Internet services and displays the result of querying a number of domains on a web page https://www.mrp.net/ipv6_survey/

AusNOG was established in 2007 to provide a technical forum for the exchange of information relating to provision of Internet services and related infrastructure services in the Australian telecommunications industry. The AusNOG board’s primary focus was the organisation of an annual two day conference, the target audience of which was engineering staff associated with network design, management and provisioning of services within telecommunications, application and Internet service providers, as well as data centre providers.For the final five years I took the lead for seeking out talks from local and international experts and creating a programme for the two-day conference that provided a broad range of talks of interest to the community. I also developed two surveys, one to provide feedback to the presenters about the reception of their talks and the other to provide attendees with the opportunity to provide feedback on the event.

Adelaide, Australia

At Juniper Networks I worked with the enterprise sales teams across the Asia Pacific region and acted as their subject matter expert for the research and education (R&E) community. The local teams used my knowledge of the community to better understand the unique needs of their R&E customers, and prospects. The role assisted the Enterprise sales executives to understand the particular demands of the sector and while the R&E community is quite broad the majority of my focus was the national research and education networks (NREN), as their needs were more akin to the needs of a regional ISP and so were quite unusual for an enterprise sales executive.I presented on Juniper solutions and industry trends at sector events, such as the APAN conference, as well as attending workshops and meetings with individual customers and potential customers.I also worked with field marketing, education services and product management to provide programmes of interest to the sector.I tracked developments within the sector globally so that I could provide technology advice to customers as well as product management and assisted in providing introductions between R&E organizations that were attempting to solve similar problems or were interested in similar research topics.

Adelaide, Australia

AARNet employed me to join its senior management team and act as the technical lead for the design and implementation of the AARNet3 network. At the time I joined AARNet it simply linked regional networks in each state using an Optus supplied ATM service. This provided them with little control over the network. As well as working on the design for an AARNet owned and managed network and subsequently the evaluation of the equipment to realise it I was also involved in the discussions with the receiver for Nextgen Networks that resulted in AARNet entering a partnership with Leightons to purchase Nextgen and building its own nationwide DWDM optical network.The new network required the selection, design and build out of new points of presence (POPs), including 5 new international POPs. The network was composed of routers from Juniper Networks and Cisco Systems while the switches were largely Cisco Catalyst. I have a vendor agnostic view of equipment and sought out the best equipment that would fit the requirements. During the build phase of the network I developed template configurations for the new equipment.I was the AARNet technical contact for the TEIN project, a EU sponsored project to enhance intra-Asian R&E connectivity.As the peering coordinator for AARNet I transformed AARNet from an organisation that purchased 100% of its Internet access from a single transit provider (Optus) to one that acquired more than 50% of its traffic via peering in Australia, Europe (DE-CIX, AMS-IX and LINX) and the west coast of the United States.As a member of the senior management team I was also involved with the strategic planning for the organization.

Adelaide, Australia

iagu networks is a small consulting company. Most of my work there was related to security, especially firewall and VPN configuration.

Adelaide, Australia

connect.com.au (Connect) was one of the first ISP's in Australia, it was acquired by AAPT and merged into their operation, later TNZ acquired AAPT with Connect still acting as its Internet arm.I was a member of the network architecture group with a primarily responsibility for the routing architecture and engineering of the network backbone and management of the transit services. I provided specialist networking support to the Director of Network Services and strategic planning advice to Connect’s senior management. I also provided on-call high-level technical support to the network engineers of the Network Operations Team.Connect had a dedicated development team but as their skills were primarily Unix system related I was often required to do development tasks for the Networks group that needed networking skills. Working with network engineers instilled in me an interest in automation and data driven configuration as this ensured a consistent configuration that resulted to less surprises. I developed a web-based system to allow the network engineers to configure customer links and customer routing in a consistent fashion.I also developed the software that managed IP address assignment to customers. This software allowed the Client Relations group to respond to customer requests for address space while also tightly managing a scarce resource and capturing information suitable for audit by APNIC.As I was based in a small branch office I would also act as a liaison with the local customers and provide (limited) pre and post sales support to the local sales team.

Adelaide, Australia

My time at the University was marked by tremendous charge in the IT landscape and as a consequence my role evolved over time. My original role was as a VAX/VMS systems programmer. The University’s IT infrastructure was based around DEC’s mini-computers but that changed with the emergence of Unix systems. I took the opportunity to migrate from VMS to Unix where I became a Unix system support specialist. The introduction of Unix systems also changed the networking landscape where TCP/IP gradually replaced DECnet. The increasing network complexity meant that I recommended that the University become one of Cisco Systems first Australian customers and purchase an AGS gateway to link together its fast growing network. While at the University I got involved with the IETF, initially in the area of directory services (X.500) and desktop video conferencing (MBONE). I was a member of the, now defunct, User Services directorate. My involvement eventually resulted in me acting as local host for the 47th IETF meeting held in Adelaide while I was at connect.com.au.My VMS and Unix skills were utilised by the Computer Science department when they requested that I assist the team that ported the VMS based text editor “Ludwig” to Unix (Ultrix), written in Pascal and C.

Adelaide, Australia

Integrated Silicon Design (ISD) was a University of Adelaide company charged with the commercialisation and development of VLSI design software. While at ISD I coded their network extraction tool and worked with their partners at the Micro-electronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) to port their VIVID software suite from Unix to VAX/VMS.

B.Sc (Hons), Computer Science

Started Law/Arts Degree