Available for collaboration

koalatech

Richard M. Pabelona Jr.

Network Engineer Professor

I love networking technologies, virtualization,
tinkering, and homelab.

Explore Homelab Get in touch
About me

Bridging Networks & Education

I’m Richard M. Pabelona Jr. — a network engineer and professor passionate about building reliable, well-documented infrastructure and sharing that knowledge in the classroom and beyond.

My work sits at the intersection of hands-on networking, virtualization, and applied research. Whether I’m routing packets, spinning up VMs, or writing lecture materials, I’m always looking for the elegant solution underneath the complexity.

Outside formal duties I run a homelab that mirrors real-world enterprise topologies — a testbed for learning, experimentation, and fun.

Teaching

Associate Professor bridging theory and hands-on practice in networking and systems.

Networking

Routing, switching, firewalls, and network automation in real and virtual environments.

Homelab

Self-hosted stack that evolves with every new technology worth exploring.

Skills & Focus

Areas of Expertise

  • Routing & Switching

    OSPF, BGP, VLANs, STP, and enterprise switching architectures.

  • Virtualization

    Hypervisors, VMs, containers, and software-defined infrastructure.

  • Network Automation

    Scripting, Ansible, Python automation, and infrastructure-as-code for network configs.

  • Security Basics

    Firewalls, ACLs, VPNs, DNS filtering, and network hardening fundamentals.

  • Teaching & Curriculum

    Designing courses, lab exercises, and learning resources for networking and systems.

My Stack

Homelab Technologies

A curated set of tools running in my home infrastructure.

  • Proxmox VE

    Open-source hypervisor platform running KVM virtual machines and LXC containers. The backbone of my homelab compute cluster.

    Hypervisor KVM LXC

  • Pi-hole

    Network-wide DNS sinkhole for ad and tracker blocking. Provides visibility into DNS queries across all devices on the network.

    DNS Ad-blocking Security

  • MikroTik CHR

    Cloud Hosted Router running RouterOS in a VM — used for advanced routing labs, MPLS experimentation, and firewall rule testing.

    RouterOS BGP MPLS

  • Alpine Linux

    Minimal, security-oriented Linux distribution used for lightweight containers and service VMs where footprint and attack surface matter.

    Linux Minimal Security

  • VMware Workstation

    Desktop hypervisor for rapid prototyping and pre-production testing of lab topologies before deploying them on the Proxmox cluster.

    VMware Desktop Prototyping
Work in progress

Projects & Labs

Selected repos, lab write-ups, and ongoing experiments.

  • Public

    koalatech.github.io

    This site — personal landing page and portfolio built as a static GitHub Pages site with a dark network-themed aesthetic.

    View on GitHub
  • Coming soon

    Network Lab Topologies

    Documented GNS3 / EVE-NG topologies for OSPF, BGP, MPLS, and more — used in classroom demonstrations.

    Work in progress
  • Coming soon

    Homelab Ansible Playbooks

    Idempotent playbooks for provisioning and configuring Proxmox guests, Pi-hole, and network devices.

    Work in progress
  • Coming soon

    Lecture Notes & Resources

    Open teaching materials covering networking fundamentals, protocols, and hands-on lab guides.

    Work in progress
Get in touch

Contact & Links

Reach out for collaborations, questions, or just to talk networking.