Projects

I believe in participating in various outside-of-work projects in order to expand my skillset and experience. One can learn a lot through these projects as they open one’s eyes to complete understanding and familiarity of various technologies. My current projects include the following:

Current Projects

• Work, work, work, and more work - I work early mornings, mid-days, and evenings, as I don't like sitting still
• Building stuff on AWS with AWS tools (looking at you DynamoDB -_-)
• Code in python, code all things!
  • Infra dashboards in Flask & Bootstrap
  • Building enterprise-y file transfer tools
  • System and service auditing tools
  • System management tools and alert response tools. This helps with responding to NMS alerts and proactively fix things. Very similar to StackStorm.
• SaltStack on CentOS and FreeBSD platforms
• Working out intensively
• Learning JunOS
• Messing around with inter-platform networking (ex. ASAs and SRX)
• Revisit OSI Layer 2/Link Layer protocols and technologies.

Past Projects

My work projects on which I have worked on include:

• Hacking away and figuring out custom-built CentOS-based environment inherited from our parent company (built by some brilliant people)
• custom mass-configuration management tools; deployment of FOSS-based config management tools that everyone knows
• coding automation and audit scripts
• NIS-based netgroup maps
• large BIND configurations
• hundreds of Linux and Solaris systems and managing them swiftly
• Upgrading and properly building out massive server infrastructure
• syslog, repositories, monitoring (Nagios, Zabbix, Zenoss), central auth/mgmt services
• Datacenter migrations, maintenances, and full-on upgrades
• Being a liaison between network and UNIX teams (tac_plus, RANCID, configuration management); upgrading and managing network equipment and cabling
• Managing enterprise mailing clusters and in-house developed enterprise applications
• Educating developers on best security practices and aiding them with becoming faster and better developers; offloading app support
• Implementing backup systems, writing backup applications, and trimming down backup system configs (Bacula, Avamar, custom scripts for apps such as OpenDS, OpenLDAP, FreeIPA, MySQL, etc)

• Work on expanding Sopel IRC framework in Python for private IRC servers
• Automating VM creation in VMware, KVM, and Xen.
• Building a High Availability UNIX cluster and successfully implementing static (public_html)/dynamic (MySQL RDBMS) content replication.
• Successfully implementing multiple virtual host/domain web hosting service.
• Building a heterogenous network both at an educational, professional, and personal level.
• Fully migrate the web/file server this website resides on to FreeBSD with ZFS and Arch Linux from Slackware Linux 12.1.
• Building a SAN cluster out of 4 machines using Openfiler/various UNIX tools.
• Improving my current High Availability solution as there are more and more techniques and softwares available now. MySQL database replication/clustering services as well incorporation of the SAN for network storage will be key areas that will be touched upon. Hello Galera!

Future Projects

In the near future I plan to follow through with these projects:

• Implement a secure, small/medium-sized networking lab using actual Cisco hardware complete with route redistribution among multiple routing protocols, access-lists, AAA server, and numerous WAN protocols.
• Continue my studies towards the CCNP and JNCIA certifications (time permitting).