System Administration, Week 2: Storage Models and Disks

In this video, we'll introduce the larger topic of filesystems and storage. In particular, we'll discuss the conceptual storage models, such as Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networks (SANs), and Cloud Storage.

https://youtu.be/w-wfCe7Yb68

#sysadmin #devops #sre

System Administration, Week 1: Warmup Exercise 1 - No Space Left On Device

In this video, we try to find out what happens when we run out of disk space as well as how the system behaves when use up all inodes. This is intended as a warmup exercise for our week 2 topic, introducing the concept of disk storage and filesystem behavior.

https://youtu.be/eyRNL6fGDM8

#sysadmin #devops #sre

System Administration, Week 1: AWS Aliases

System Administrators are notoriously lazy, and AWS commands a notoriously lengthy to type. In this video, we demonstrate the use of shell aliases and functions to save ourselves some typing whenever we run AWS EC2 commands.

https://youtu.be/fnWdB20_OoY

The aliases and shell functions we use are available here:
https://github.com/jschauma/cloud-functions/blob/main/awsfuncs

#sysadmin #devops #sre

System Administration, Week 1: Warming up to EC2

In this short video, we prepare for our first homework assignment and demonstrate how to launch a #NetBSD instance in AWS EC2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA_pgRH0IDw

Note: the AMI in the video is outdated; I have up to date images listed here:
https://stevens.netmeister.org/615/netbsd-amis.html

Or you can create your own:
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/creating-netbsd-ec2-amis.html

#sysadmin #devops #sre

System Administration, Week 1: UNIX History

We're borrowing this video from our "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" class to give a brief summary of the history of the UNIX family of operating systems.

https://youtu.be/3H7SQWTR6Dw

#sysadmin #devops #sre #unix

I’m currently looking for a full-time or contract work in SRE / DevOps / IT Operations.
Portland, OR. Open to hybrid, on-site, or remote. Willing to relocate to Seattle.
Schedule: Any

Tools: Python, Bash, PowerShell, Terraform, Jenkins, Puppet, Ansible, Splunk, Grafana, BigPanda
CI/CD: Jenkins, Bitbucket, container builds with Docker/Podman, deployments to Openshift.

I have worked as an IT Operations Engineer in enterprise production environments, supporting on-prem VMware (RHEL and Windows) alongside Azure and AWS. My role included on-call rotations and incident command for high-severity outages.

My responsibilities included monitoring, alert triage, and root cause analysis across infrastructure and application layers, coordinating with infrastructure, development, and product teams to isolate failures, restore service, and prevent recurrence.

My focus was developing Python tooling for automation and production support, with Ansible used for routine infrastructure tasks.

I worked extensively with Splunk, Grafana, and BigPanda, building dashboards for investigation, event correlation, and metrics and trends.

Additional experience includes:

Terraform for cloud provisioning and Puppet for configuration enforcement

Network troubleshooting across Cisco and Arista environments

Production database support: Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, Postgres

My DM’s are open! Feel free to message me for my resume.

Git: github.com/Aleph0x
Web: https://www.al3f.com

#fedihire #hiring #getfedihired #sre #DevOps #SysADmin

I’m currently looking for a full-time or contract work in SRE / DevOps / IT Operations.
Portland, OR. Open to hybrid, on-site, or remote. Willing to relocate to Seattle.
Schedule: Any

Tools: Python, Bash, PowerShell, Terraform, Jenkins, Puppet, Ansible, Splunk, Grafana, BigPanda
CI/CD: Jenkins, Bitbucket, container builds with Docker/Podman, deployments to Openshift.

I have worked as an IT Operations Engineer in enterprise production environments, supporting on-prem VMware (RHEL and Windows) alongside Azure and AWS. My role included on-call rotations and incident command for high-severity outages.

My responsibilities included monitoring, alert triage, and root cause analysis across infrastructure and application layers, coordinating with infrastructure, development, and product teams to isolate failures, restore service, and prevent recurrence.

My focus was developing Python tooling for automation and production support, with Ansible used for routine infrastructure tasks.

I worked extensively with Splunk, Grafana, and BigPanda, building dashboards for investigation, event correlation, and metrics and trends.

Additional experience includes:

Terraform for cloud provisioning and Puppet for configuration enforcement

Network troubleshooting across Cisco and Arista environments

Production database support: Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, Postgres

My DM’s are open! Feel free to message me for my resume.

Git: github.com/Aleph0x
Web: https://www.al3f.com

#fedihire #hiring #getfedihired #sre #DevOps #SysADmin

This semester, I'm teaching my class on System Administration / Internet Operations once again.

The syllabus and all course materials are available here:

https://stevens.netmeister.org/615/

All videos for the lectures and exercises are public and available for free on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/c/cs615asa/videos

If you want to follow along, I'll be posting lecture videos and related links in this thread throughout the semester.

#sysadmin #devops #sre

This semester, I'm teaching my class on System Administration / Internet Operations once again.

The syllabus and all course materials are available here:

https://stevens.netmeister.org/615/

All videos for the lectures and exercises are public and available for free on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/c/cs615asa/videos

If you want to follow along, I'll be posting lecture videos and related links in this thread throughout the semester.

#sysadmin #devops #sre

I've released version 2.2.0 of Exosphere, my patch reporting program for remote UNIX systems.

It contains support for SSH connection pipelining, with associated tools to manage their state, as well as an exhaustive polish pass.

Multiple internal systems have been refactored to be much cleaner and easier to maintain.

https://github.com/mrdaemon/exosphere/releases/tag/v2.2.0

#exosphere #linux #unix #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #HomeLab #SRE #Python

I've released version 2.2.0 of Exosphere, my patch reporting program for remote UNIX systems.

It contains support for SSH connection pipelining, with associated tools to manage their state, as well as an exhaustive polish pass.

Multiple internal systems have been refactored to be much cleaner and easier to maintain.

https://github.com/mrdaemon/exosphere/releases/tag/v2.2.0

#exosphere #linux #unix #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #HomeLab #SRE #Python

It's time to throw the line out again.

I have been working in SRE for 13 years. I am a specialist in Observability, Incident Management, and DevEx. I have also managed teams and been certified in observability, agile, and unix operating systems.

In June of 2025, I was suddenly laid off. I'm still jobless in my seventh month of trying to find work.

I'll be completely honest, I don't know why I can't find a role, I'm either over- or under-qualified, I either give too much detail or not enough, I don't tell it like a story or I tell it too much like it's a story.

The people I used to work with have been shocked when I tell them I can't find work. One of them even said:

"you have such a great mix of talents that I wish more engineers had, and I still cite you as an example of the type of people I want to work with"

If you know of any leads in the SRE, DevEx, DevOps, InfoSec, or anything of the sort, I'm still searching as hard as I can.

Remote, I'm in Southern California.

My profile on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcookedavis

For direct help, please buy my music:

https://craque.bandcamp.com

#sre #FediHire