About snakemittens

I was once told that I would become a half-decent sysadmin some day.

Has this day come? Who knows. It has been a few years since I was told this by a former coworker, and in the intervening time, I’ve figured out:

• Linux systems administration (RHEL and CentOS, mostly)
• Windows systems administration
• Mac systems administration
• Automating systems deployment with Ansible, Puppet, and Salt
• Deployment and administration of load-balanced web farms, failover clustered custom applications (did someone say iSCSI LUNs?), containers (Docker!), and weird things like that
• Log aggregation and analysis platform setup and administration (Graylog, ELK stack, QRadar)
• System and application monitoring (Grafana, Prometheus, SCOM, SCOM with Linux clients, Nagios, Zabbix…)
• Data analysis platform setup and administration (Hadoop, Jupyter, Zeppelin, SSRS, PowerBI…)
• Atlassian product administration and support (primarily Confluence and JIRA)
• Team chat application administration (Mattermost, anyone?)
• Assorted web development in whatever language is needed (all of them! all at once!)
• Networking is fine and all, but they prefer managing servers
• Documentation is important! (And I’m pretty good at it!)

This probably wasn’t the path that was expected when the comment was said, but that’s how it turned out.

I’ve also developed a strange fondness for and proficiency at rescuing old, creaky applications from older, creakier servers and restoring them to modern infrastructure. This has led to debugging and converting a suprising amount of ancient Perl code. Coincidentally, I’m no longer fond of Perl.