Servers you can rebuild in an afternoon

Selected work demonstrating this service.

• 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.

• Provisioned Azure infrastructure as code

  Provisioned Azure infrastructure as code with Bicep — Container Apps, PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Front Door/WAF and networking — across the development, staging and production environments.

• Implemented backups and disaster recovery as code

  Configured database backup retention as infrastructure‑as‑code, then audited the recovery position and documented the restore procedure — naming the remaining gaps rather than leaving them to be found during an incident.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Added a one‑second preflight for secrets

  Added a preflight play that runs the same code as the converge against operator‑local secrets in about a second, after a half‑applied production run died on its ninth task with the swap settings already written to the live host.

• Reconciled a 20‑record DNS zone as code

  Reconciled a 20‑record DNS zone declaratively against the Cloudflare API with separate audit and BIND‑export entry points, and turned the CDN proxy back off on privacy grounds after building it.

• 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.

• 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.

• Provisioned a second server from code

  Automated the provisioning of a second server on a second cloud provider, creating the firewall before the machine so it is born behind one, with both providers' firewalls written directly against their REST APIs to avoid a third‑party collection.

• 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.