System Administration

• 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.

• Led access management across M365 and SSO

  Prevented security breaches by leading access management initiatives, utilizing M365, 1Password, Red Hat SSO, and OKTA SSO.

• 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.

• Established a Technical Support department

  Established a Technical Support department, servicing over 10,000 clients with IT support and troubleshooting solutions, tracking client requests in a CRM.

• Managed a team delivering IT support

  Managed a team delivering IT support, data recovery, and hardware repair services to over 1,000 clients, ensuring high‑quality service.

• Configured and deployed 1,000 Wi‑Fi routers

  Configured and deployed 1,000 Wi‑Fi routers, improving network accessibility and performance for clients.

• Managed 4,000 computer repairs

  Managed 4,000 computer repairs, ensuring rapid and effective resolution of hardware and software issues.

• 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.

• Built infrastructure that still runs years later

  Planned and implemented new infrastructure functionality for internal and external systems, building solutions durable enough to still run years later with minimal change.

• Built the entire core infrastructure from scratch

  As one of the first hires, designed and built the entire core infrastructure and supporting processes from scratch for a green‑energy SaaS startup, laying the foundation for rapid growth.

• Integrated a company‑wide password manager

  Integrated a company‑wide password‑management system, strengthening security and streamlining access control.

• Recovered data from SD cards, HDDs, SSDs and RAID

  Performed data recovery across a wide range of media — SD cards, HDDs, SSDs, RAID arrays, external drives and Mac systems.

• 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.

• Built the operator back‑office for the platform

  Built the operator back‑office — around 40 admin routes and 128 components covering claims, moderation, feature flags, cache and diagnostics — so the platform can be run without database access.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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, Security & Access Management, IT Support & Helpdesk, Networking & VPN Setup, Infrastructure as Code, Site Reliability & Monitoring, Hardware Repair & Data Recovery and AI Agent Security.

Building something that needs this? Get in touch.