Network · Cyber defense · Infrastructure · Linux · Observability

You can watch
my network run.

Twenty years of networks across government, national labs, healthcare, telecom and energy — and 350 sites of enterprise network at Expeditors today. The infrastructure and SRE side isn't a bullet point: there's a 36-device lab online right now that you can walk through yourself.

Open the live lab Experience Résumé (PDF)
Live topology 36 / 36 up
4 sites36 devices 35 links60s poll0 down
Open the live lab
Chance Gearhart

Start here — meet Chance

Two minutes on who I am, how I think about networks, and what I'm looking for next. Everything below this is the evidence.

Video · 2 min
20 yrsIn IT since 2006 — wireless tech to enterprise network engineer
1,200+Cisco routers updated — six months of scheduled work delivered in 1.5 weeks
1,600→400Firewall rules consolidated at a regional electric cooperative
12 racks100-server hospital data center migrated in two days

What I actually do

Five domains

Network engineering

Enterprise WAN, campus and data center design and integration — 350 branch and DC sites today.

BGPOSPFMPLS QoSMulticastNexus JunOSMistAruba

Cyber defense

Hardening held to DoD standards at Sandia; zero-trust segmentation and rule hygiene ever since.

Palo AltoCheckpoint Tipping PointOPNsenseRADIUS iptables

IT infrastructure

Windows and Linux fleets, hypervisors and containers under business-critical applications.

ProxmoxVMware DockerKubernetesBackup Exec IPAM / DDI

Linux & automation

Two decades of Linux and BSD, plus a FLOSS bias that keeps infrastructure cheap and legible.

RHELDebian CentOSFreeBSDBash PythonAnsible

Monitoring & SRE

If it isn't instrumented it isn't finished — dashboards, probes, alert routing, log pipelines.

SolarWindsPrometheus GrafanaAlertmanagerBlackbox NetFlow

The lab is the portfolio

lab.chancegearhart.com

Not a diagram. A GNS3-backed multi-site network that has been up for months — real OPNsense firewalls, WireGuard tunnels between sites, BGP via FRR, and Prometheus scraping every device. The public page is a server-side render of live state, refreshed every 60 seconds, with no control plane exposed.

Behind it sits a two-site physical homelab on real hardware, each site running its own private ASN and peering over BGP, monitored with Prometheus and Grafana and automated with n8n.

GNS3OPNsense FRR / BGPWireGuard ProxmoxDocker Swarm TraefikVictoriaLogs
Inspect the topology How it's built
PRIMARYOPNsense edge · core + 3 access · Proxmox · Traefik · Prometheus17
SECONDARYOPNsense edge · Docker Swarm ×3 · app host · ntfy11
REMOTEOPNsense edge · switch · smokeping probe3
CLOUDVPS automation · VPS monitoring2
EDGEISP router (double-NAT) · internet exchange3

Built because I wanted them

github.com/iamgadgetman

nola

n8n

Non-Organic Lab Assistant — self-hosted n8n + Claude + Discord that watches the homelab and answers questions about it in plain English.

job-scout

n8n

Scrapes listings, scores fit with AI, generates tailored documents, writes them to Notion and pings Discord.

jarvis

Java

A Minecraft plugin that gives every player their own AI assistant. Built for fun, shipped like software.

everything else

More

Fleet update automation, the lab dashboard, a homelab AI butler, and seventeen years of build notes on the blog.

Where I've been

2006 → now

2025 — nowAirway Heights, WA

Expeditors International

Network Engineer · Data Centers Networking Team

Design and implementation for a global enterprise network of 350 locations and 19,000+ employees. I integrate networks for new branches and data centers and support the global and local networks — Cisco Nexus and HP/Aruba wired, Cisco WLC and Juniper Mist wireless.

2020 — 2024Hermiston, OR

Umatilla Electric Cooperative

System Administrator

Windows and Linux servers, VMware and Proxmox, Docker for scalable deployment, and SolarWinds Orion across routers, switches, firewalls, VPNs and zero-trust networking.

2016 — 2019Albuquerque, NM

University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center

Network Engineer · one of two leads

Albuquerque's largest employer — 7,000+ staff and 30,000+ patients weekly across hospital and academic facilities, with 1,000+ network devices under my team's care.

2014 — 2015Albuquerque, NM

Sandia National Laboratories via SAIC

Computer Infrastructure Specialist

Non-proliferation initiatives inside nuclear defense operations — hardening IT devices and rebuilding the documentation standard for sensitive systems.

Full history, contributions and education

Off the clock

Homelab & hobbies

Two sites, two ASNs, one residential connection

The physical homelab behind the GNS3 lab: two locations peered over BGP, both running OPNsense with FRR, on recycled enterprise hardware and open-source software.

SitesThe Fort and Hawk House, each a /22 with its own private ASN
RoutingOPNsense + FRR, BGP between sites, dynamic DNS on both edges
ComputeFive-node cluster — Proxmox, Docker, Kubernetes, game servers
ObservabilityPrometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, VictoriaLogs, smokeping
AutomationAnsible for config, n8n for the glue, Discord for the alerts
The full build

The rest of it

Game servers, hosted and streamed

I run and maintain servers for myself and other people — the hardware, the backend, and the streams.

Billiards

League and tournament play since 18, including two national events in Las Vegas.

Photography

Fifteen-plus years behind a camera, mostly nature and landscape, mostly while travelling.

Road trips off paper maps

Route picked at random, country roads over highways, nothing booked in advance.

The Grief Center, Albuquerque

Volunteer since 2013 — five years with the school-year program, and still with Camp Corazón every summer.

What people say

References

“Chance brought many skills to the team — the engineer that I would give tasks to that required good collaboration between different areas.”

Matthew Braun · former CIO, UNM Health Sciences Center

“Chance's deep technical knowledge spans network architecture, systems administration, and advanced cybersecurity protocols.”

David Baker · former coworker

“Chance Gearhart is a genius-level problem solver.”

Jade Richardson Boch · former Director, Children's Grief Center

Looking for someone who has already done it.

Based in Spokane, WA, and looking to return to Walla Walla. Open to remote, and to on-site roles across Spokane, Walla Walla and the Tri-Cities. Travel under 15%.

LinkedIn GitHub Résumé

Goes straight to me. No list, no newsletter, no recruiter database.

© 2026 Chance Gearhart · Spokane, WA lab · blog · github · linkedin