Linux & Servers

• Built the company's first observability dashboard

  Developed and launched the company's first observability dashboard, providing real‑time system performance insights and data visualization on the large office TV.

• Ran 10 PostgreSQL and MS SQL servers on Ubuntu

  Designed, deployed, and maintained 10 PostgreSQL and MS SQL servers on Ubuntu Linux VPS, ensuring optimal server performance and reliability.

• Wrote 1,000 RBAC rules to secure Linux servers

  Enhanced data security by implementing 1,000 RBAC rules for developers, application instances, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, and other Linux servers, preventing unauthorized access; documented with Ansible automation.

• Managed 30 Ubuntu Linux VPS instances

  Managed 30 Ubuntu Linux VPS instances, implementing disaster recovery strategies and ensuring optimal network configurations.

• Managed 8 WireGuard and IPsec VPN connections

  Managed and troubleshot 8 WireGuard VPN and IPsec VPN connections, ensuring secure communication across Google Cloud and Linux systems.

• Administered network infrastructure

  Administered network infrastructure for over 1,000 servers, ensuring optimal system deployment, security, and troubleshooting.

• Automated SSL/TLS certs for 100 Docker apps

  Automated SSL/TLS certificate creation for 100 Docker applications, ensuring secure connections across Ubuntu Linux hosts.

• Administered 100 Bare Bone servers

  Administered 100 Bare Bone servers, physical networks, and IP telephony systems, ensuring robust infrastructure for company growth.

• Administered 40 websites on Apache and Nginx

  Administered 40 websites on Ubuntu Linux hosting servers with Apache and Nginx, ensuring high availability and performance.

• Ran 24/7 support for ~1,000 IPTV/OTT servers

  Provided round‑the‑clock 24/7 infrastructure support for an IPTV/OTT streaming platform, administering ~1,000 servers plus client‑owned systems for global customers in China, the US and Germany.

• Kept IPTV streaming signals running non‑stop

  Ensured uninterrupted delivery of IPTV streaming signals between suppliers and clients, monitoring and maintaining the streaming network and IP telephony around the clock.

• Diagnosed and repaired laptop hardware

  Diagnosed and repaired laptop hardware — screens, hinges, keyboards, trackpads, motherboards and power — and resolved software issues across Linux, Windows and Mac.

• Servers you can rebuild from scratch

  Built the company's own infrastructure as 19 Ansible playbooks and 34 roles across 12,065 lines of YAML, converging a live host to a declared state with every play idempotent.

• A whole company on one small server

  Ran the whole company on one 512 MB single‑core host — a git forge, a web server serving seven domains, Tor, two alternate‑protocol servers, backups and intrusion banning — by treating 464 MB of usable memory as the binding architectural constraint.

• Three locks on the door, none of them locked

  Found and closed three SSH brute‑force protections that had never worked: a ban jail watching port 22 while the daemon listened on 1986, a rate limit shadowed by a broader rule above it, and a ban action whose binary never resolved, so no ban had ever applied.

• Hardened SSH to 24 validated directives

  Hardened SSH to 24 asserted directives with three‑stage validation — the candidate file, the assembled config, then the daemon's own read‑back — after the read‑back caught the running server silently overriding two of the twenty‑four.

• Proved the intrusion ban works every run

  Proved the intrusion‑banning path end to end on every hardening run by banning a reserved test address, reading the resulting kernel rule and unbanning in a guaranteed cleanup block, so a jail that stops working fails a run instead of reporting healthy.

• Verified firewall rules by position

  Verified firewall rules by position rather than presence, reading the numbered rule list and the live packet‑filter chain, because a rule that exists is not a rule any packet reaches.

• Backups that have actually been restored

  Built encrypted off‑host backups on restic with retention pruning, an integrity check and a monthly automated restore drill, then audited the recovery position and wrote down the gaps rather than leaving them to be found during an incident.

• Built dead‑man's‑switch host monitoring

  Built dead‑man's‑switch monitoring that pings only while memory and disk are healthy, so a degraded host raises an alert by going silent — and caught six variable names saying "free" where the check correctly measured "available", an order of magnitude apart on a 464 MB box.

• Made Ansible check mode tell the truth

  Made check mode tell the truth across the whole platform after finding six probes deciding on a value the host never gave, because Ansible's command module reports success under --check while skipping the command entirely.

• Cut systemd sandbox exposure on every unit

  Cut systemd sandbox exposure across every unit this platform installs — a dead‑man's‑switch service from 9.6 UNSAFE to 1.5, an internet‑facing git forge from 8.3 EXPOSED to 1.5 — and added a converge‑time parser check after finding a misspelled directive silently ignored in three unit templates.

• Built 7 read‑only host reporting roles

  Built seven read‑only reporting roles that render a live host to Markdown — facts, access, git, metrics, traffic, security and provider inventory — under a rule that no number is printed the run did not measure.

• Your code on your own hardware

  Deployed the company's own git forge on Soft Serve, private by default with no web panel and its SSH port bound to loopback behind a jump host, and made the landing page in front of it a build artefact of the main site rather than a hand‑kept copy.

• Ran containers on Podman and Quadlet

  Deployed a container plane on Podman and Quadlet under systemd rather than Docker, because Docker publishes container ports above the host firewall's own rules — and gave deploys an unprivileged user with one fixed command instead of root.

• Split every operational secret per host

  Split the four per‑host operational secrets after establishing that two hosts sharing one dead‑man's switch alert less than two switches, not more, and that a shared backup passphrase makes two hosts one repository.

• Rehearsed the forge CI hook, found 2 defects

  Rehearsed the forge‑side CI hook and found two defects unreachable by reading the file: a fallback that put an unresolvable argument on the hook's input, and git's own environment variable following the gate into the checkout and turning 19 tests red.

• Published a readable Tor onion mirror

  Published the site as a Tor onion mirror on a readable address beginning engineer, with the key generated off the host so it never reached this repository or a laptop, and left it the one front door of four that is never counted.

This work is part of what we offer as System Administration, Infrastructure as Code, Security & Access Management, Site Reliability & Monitoring, Networking & VPN Setup, DevOps & CI/CD Automation, AI Agent Security and Backup & Disaster Recovery.

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