Enterprise Security Architect & (retired) Juniper Ambassador. Designing & deploying “keep the bad guys out” technologies. Delivering elephants and not hunting unicorns.

Where did the name “ssl boy” come from? Desperation mostly, and a bit of fanboism on my part.  Back when I joined twitter in ooh, 2009? I had no intention of using it for anything other than keeping an eye on what Stephen Fry was up to, so I picked the first name that came into my head (which wasn’t my name). As you can probably guess, much of my day job at the time revolved around configuring things which have SSL certificates; Remote Access VPNs, Firewalls, and Load balancers.  The “boy” part comes in partial tribute to Dameon D. Welch-Abernathy (runner up for “name most likely to be misspelled Award: 2002”, only beaten to 2nd place by “Aasdfjaskdfasjk werwmmasmamammamaa maslfalfas Jones”) who ran the Check Point Firewall-1 FAQ, long before an official thing existed.  His site (and by extension Daemeon, Deemon, Phoneboy) saved my butt on more than one occasion, so the name and by extension, this site, is in part tribute to him.

So there we go, a terrible twitter name, but 400+ followers later I can’t do much about it. Also: Just for reference, our political views are pretty much diametrically opposed but nonetheless I’ve massive respect for the guy.

Anyway, if you want to get hold of me regarding writing, blogging or general beers Twitter is where I’m most likely to spot any direct communications. If you prefer your communications a bit more 2002, then try to: “mailme (at) sslboy dot net“. Not sure if that still works against mail spammers, or even if that’s still a thing.

Otherwise:

Please free to add me on Google +, follow me on Twitter or check out my other blogs on Fortinet Juniper J-Net (Retired), PacketPushers, and SearchSDN & SearchNetworking.