Bill Kirwin
Infrastructure engineer. 25+ years building and maintaining IT systems for small businesses on Cape Cod and beyond.
I design networks, deploy servers, plan disaster recovery, and build documentation that outlasts any single provider — including me. The systems I put in are meant to run for years, recover in minutes, and never lock a client into something they can’t understand or control.
What I Actually Do
Network architecture and segmentation. Firewall policy. DNS and DHCP infrastructure. Virtualization with Proxmox. Backup systems built on Proxmox Backup Server with verified restores. Self-hosted private cloud deployments — file sync, email, monitoring, logging — all on hardware the client owns. I work across Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch), macOS, and Windows Server environments going back to NT 3.5.
I also build and maintain mail servers, support Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and deploy open-source tooling where it makes sense. If it runs on a network, I’ve probably touched it.
How I Work
No ticket queues. No junior techs. No escalation ladders. When you call, you get me — someone who already knows your environment because I built it and documented it.
I don’t sell products. I don’t push subscriptions. I build infrastructure using open, industry-standard platforms so that if you ever move on, another qualified admin can pick up where I left off. You’re never trapped.
Every environment I manage is documented, every backup is tested, and every change is logged. That’s not a feature — that’s the baseline.
Background
My first computer was a Commodore PET. I’ve been doing this since the days of Concurrent DOS, LANtastic, Novell NetWare, and Banyan VINES. Built custom PCs in the ’90s. Standardized small business networks on Dell PowerEdge and Optiplex hardware in the 2000s. Moved to virtualization, open-source infrastructure, and self-hosted platforms as the industry caught up to what I was already doing.
I still have an operational machine from 1989 sitting on a shelf — a 386-class prototype that’s actually a 486 running on a 386 BIOS. SX/25MHz, 16MB of RAM on the biggest 16-bit ISA card you’ve ever seen. I added an ISA NIC, an ISA IDE controller, and a hard drive running Windows 95 with DDO for the drive geometry. I still fire it up every few years. Most people today don’t even know what DDO is. That machine still boots.
Today I run a Proxmox cluster, manage segmented VLANs behind OPNsense firewalls, operate self-hosted cloud stacks with Nextcloud, and build monitoring with Grafana and InfluxDB. The tools changed. The fundamentals didn’t.
Network Services of Cape Cod — Infrastructure you control. Support you trust.