About Me

I'm a Linux System Administrator based in Scotland, working in a SaaS environment. The job is mostly server management, cloud infrastructure, and automation, with the occasional all hands-on deck incident where the whole global team jumps out of bed and gets at it.

What I Work With

Professionally I work mostly on Linux systems in the cloud, primarily AWS, but a few others in the mix. Some DC EL-based systems (Rocky Linux, CentOS) are still out there. In my current role, OpenResty, PHP, and PostgreSQL making up the main stack. Redis for caching, CloudFlare out front, AWS underneath, and Dynatrace and Grafana for monitoring. Much of my day is spent dealing with server alerts, configuring Cloudflare WAF rules when bot or DDoS attacks hit our clients, and setting up new systems.

Logging is everything, notes are king, and I still live by the mantra my first IT mentor taught me, divide and conquer.

The Home Lab

Outside of work I run a homelab on a Dell OptiPlex 5040 I got for £20 on eBay, running Proxmox VE with a mix of LXC containers and VMs. After upgrading the RAM to 32gb, it does the job. Gitea and GitLab for version control, various web servers and my own personal cloud with remote access. Jellyfin for media, and HomeTown, a custom monitoring dashboard I keep adding bits to, because I just can't stop finding new tools and fun projects. Most of the projects on this site live on or around it.

My daily driver is EndeavourOS, I'm quite new to the Arch ecosystem, but after running Endeavour for the last six months, I really love it. Previously I've run openSUSE Tumbleweed, which is fantastic, and I brought a few of its specialties like snapper over to Endeavour, and vanilla Debian over the years - Debian in particular is up there among the best Linux distros ever made. Most of my VMs are Debian, though I do like to branch out, and sometimes it's beneficial.. the right tool for the right job!

Outside Work

When I'm away from a screen I'm usually with my wife and our pets (one spaniel who still thinks she is a puppy, and two crazy cats), playing guitar, or looking for a new trail to ride. I'm on the east coast of Scotland, which is great for cycling, with the highlands 40 minutes drive away, I can always get a break from the screen..perhaps not as often as my wife would like. Kona the cat makes an appearance on the homepage and takes no responsibility for anything that's broken, blame that on her mad sister Hilo.

Tools & Technologies

Linux (AL2, Rocky, CentOS, EndeavourOS, Debian) · OpenResty / Nginx · PHP · PostgreSQL · MySQL · Redis · Python · Bash · AWS · CloudFlare · Proxmox VE · Docker / LXC · GitLab CI/CD · Grafana · DynaTrace · Vim ·

Resume

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