Lucas Borza - Oberbean

13 Apr 2026 · 6 min read

Automate the Network or Someone Else Will

For most of my career, being good at networking meant being good at the CLI. Knowing your way around IOS, understanding what the show commands were actually telling you, being

11 Apr 2026 · 13 min read

NetBox: The Death of Network Spreadsheets

There's a network spreadsheet. You know the one. It has multiple tabs with all of your network infrastructure and circuits in it. The last time anyone updated it

22 Mar 2026 · 3 min read

Moving Smarter, Not Harder: Lessons from My 757CIO Mentorship Session with Peter Wallace (Session 3)

I had the opportunity to sit down again with Peter Wallace, CIO of the City of Virginia Beach, as part of the 757CIO mentorship program. Every conversation lands differently depending

17 Mar 2026 · 2 min read

GitHub vs. GitLab: Why I Switched My Home Lab

Everyone has an opinion on this one. Most of those opinions are wrong...not because they pick the wrong platform, but because they treat it like a competition when it&

13 Mar 2026 · 3 min read

Why Things Go Wrong When Everything Was Fine

You've probably been there. A ticket comes in, or an alert fires, or worse...an end user calls. Something broke. And when you start pulling the thread, you

10 Mar 2026 · 3 min read

The Quietest Person in the Room: Lessons from My 757CIO Mentorship Session with Peter Wallace (Session 2)

There's something uniquely humbling about being the quietest person in a room full of people. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit in on an executive level IT

7 Mar 2026 · 5 min read

Pillage, Plunder, and Pull Requests: GitHub for Network Engineers

Picture a Viking jarl showing up at a Renaissance fair. He's out of place by about 500 years, and everyone's staring. I know this feeling firsthand.

5 Mar 2026 · 4 min read

Chugging Cisco Kool-Aid and Other Mistakes I Don't Regret

I know...calling something a mistake and then saying you don't regret it in the same breath is a little contradictory. But stick with me, because that tension

4 Mar 2026 · 3 min read

The Art of Asking Dumb Questions

I joined a new organization not too long ago. Bigger than anywhere I had been before. More teams, more moving parts, more opinions in every room. The kind of place

27 Feb 2026 · 3 min read

What I Learned at Hampton Roads DevFest

Hampton Roads DevFest was one of those events that sneaks up on you. You show up for the sessions and leave with a head full of ideas, plenty of new

25 Feb 2026 · 3 min read

Leading From Anywhere: Lessons from My 757CIO Mentorship Session with Peter Wallace (Session 1)

When I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Wallace, Chief Information Officer of the City of Virginia Beach through the 757CIO mentorship program, I wasn't sure

22 Feb 2026 · 3 min read

Cisco ISE and NAC: The Art of Breaking Everything at Once

There's a moment in many infrastructure teams where someone says: "We should really implement NAC." No one argues that Network Access Control is a bad idea.

19 Feb 2026 · 2 min read

Explaining Kubernetes Ingress TLS Certificates to a 4-Year-Old

It was a normal day working from home. I was sitting at my desk, typing away, when I heard my son's little voice "Daddy...what are you

18 Feb 2026 · 3 min read

When Nexus Downgrades Upgrade Your FEX: A Hard Lesson

Recently, I had one of those moments that every networking guy eventually runs into...a failed Cisco Nexus switch. Nothing exotic. Nothing exciting. Just the kind of failure that shows

17 Feb 2026 · 3 min read

Why My Self Hosted Ghost Subscribe Flow Broke

Every so often, I stop and ask myself, "what the heck was I thinking?" This was one of those times. I spent several days debugging my self-hosted Ghost

17 Feb 2026 · 2 min read

Why MTU Matters More Than You Think

MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) is one of those configurations that rarely gets attention. Applications hang, files take forever to transfer, and connections seem sluggish—but nothing obvious appears broken. More

17 Feb 2026 · 1 min read

What is Oberbean?

This is Oberbean, a new blog by Lucas Borza focused on networking, devops, home labs, things that broke at 2 am, and the occasional “how did this ever work?” moment.