About Me

Hi!

I'm an infrastructure / operations engineer with a background in Linux, cloud infrastructure, networking, automation, and DevOps/SRE-style work. Outside of work, I spend far too much time building and breaking things in my homelab.

I originally came to OpenWrt through home networking and gradually developed an interest in the lower layers: switches, bootloaders, device trees, flash layouts, PHYs, GPIO, and how inexpensive networking hardware actually works.

WIP (need to get serial access to the board lol)

Development thread: OpenWrt forum development thread

I'm currently working on adding OpenWrt support for the Mokerlink 2G080GM, an 8-port 2.5GbE managed switch based on the Realtek RTL9303 platform.

A large part of the work has involved comparing the device against related RTL9303 designs already supported by OpenWrt, then verifying assumptions against the physical hardware rather than treating similar boards as identical.

• https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/25193
• https://forum.openwrt.org/t/253636

My main technical interests include:

• Linux systems
• Networking and switching
• OpenWrt
• Infrastructure automation
• DevOps / SRE
• Kubernetes and platform engineering
• Self-hosting and homelab infrastructure
• Reverse engineering poorly documented hardware
• Making inexpensive hardware do things its vendor never intended

I'm particularly interested in the intersection between traditional infrastructure engineering and lower-level Linux / embedded systems work.

• GitHub: ctalaveraw

I'm still learning the OpenWrt development and upstreaming process. If you spot something incorrect in my work or documentation, constructive feedback is very welcome.