I have been in the IT business for right at 31 years, I graduated in 1991 from the Florida Career College (Florida Business School) back when I was there. I have done many things in my career, I graduated with a computer business programming degree, but started as a PC Technician. From there I became a call center technician/support specialist I did that until around 2000. Then I got my first systems engineer role it was a small company who was at the fore front of Fiber Optics and the implementation of it in the work place. My predecessor decided to put all of the vital roles of the company on one system which was a cobalt appliance and I was content with it, it worked so no reason to re-invent the wheel until the wheel breaks that is. Email was down file services/server was down some other vital stuff was down as well. So I had to rebuild the whole infrastructure, Email, 2 File Servers, 2 DCs (Win 2000 mind you), App server for Autocad, and a few other small things it took me from Friday night at 5 pm til Sunday night at about 9 to 10 pm to get everything back up and running including 125 remote user accounts plus the 25 in-office users and their remote accounts. From that point on it’s been a ride lol. I got into Linux/Unix during a stint in the middle 2000’s when I worked for HP at their Houston Tx campus. Then I worked as a Linux Admin for one the most popular hosting companies in the US (HostGator based in Houston Tx) I learned a ton about hosting and all the services there-in as well-as customer service and the importance of keeping things running from those guys and they were awesome IT folks and dayum they were very good at what they do/did. From 2008 til now, I have been working mostly in DevOps Infrastructure, CI/CD Pipelines & Virtualization Proxmox, VMWare, The only cloud stuff that I have done to this point is Kubernetes/Docker stuff (If you want to call that cloud) and I do have a real good handle on it and how it works.
So now at the twilight of my career, I am trying to have fun with all of this knowledge I gained. In 2011 or 2012 (It might have been later) I started taking an interest in Raspberry Pi’s. They weren’t totally developed as of yet but they were well on their way to it. Now I have 17 Pi’s 5 HP EliteDesk minis w/32 gb of ram 8 cores for my virtualization experiements and I also have a (4) home made NAS’ of 30 tb to store everything on. I built the NAS with Ubuntu Server and Webmin as the GUI for it. Believe it or not they are clustered and It works like a champ actually.
I am hoping to give some of this knowledge back to community and I am hoping to help some of you youngins’ get started on your way in an IT future. So let me know if I am doing okay …… I am available generally anytime so get a hold of me …… Thanks for your time and enjoy yourself.
Michael Cooper