Hi there! We would love to hear about you. 
What you do, and what draws you to Linux and tech?
Hit one of the reply buttons to introduce yourself…
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Continued from the original Welcome thread!
I’m still “around”! Welcome to all newcomers!
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I’m also still around, I’m just sporadically appearing and disappearing. (still stuck on trying to create a bootable, read-only, image of linux from a compiled code base lol.)
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hey everyone sorry i’ve been gone for the past 2 weeks or so but i’ve been busy with school and everything else and working on my home lab but i’ve finally got it up and running and im proud to say this is all that i have been able to accomplish with it:
Home Lab & Technical Projects Event-Driven Automation & Hybrid-Cloud Management
Autonomous Monitoring Agent: Architected a real-time, event-driven Discord bot using the n8n automation engine to provide remote telemetry and command execution for a multi-node Proxmox environment.
Secure Tunneling & Integration:Bridged cloud APIs with local Linux infrastructure over a Tailscale mesh VPN, enabling secure SSH automation and remote management without exposing public firewall ports.
Custom Bash Scripting:Authored and optimized shell scripts to parse Linux hardware utilization (Xeon CPUs, NVIDIA GPU thermals/loads) and Proxmox hypervisor guest states (qmlist) directly to mobile devices.
API & Systems Troubleshooting: Enforced infrastructure security via API Privileged Gateway Intents and successfully debugged Linux daemon configuration hierarchy overrides (sshd_config) alongside deprecated NPM package dependencies.
Private Cloud & Virtualization Infrastructure Hardware Architecture: Engineered an enterprise-grade home server utilizing a Dell Precision T7910 with dual Intel Xeon processors (56 threads) and 128GB RAM. Configured high-performance, fault-tolerant storage architectures utilizing a 4-drive SSD RAID array for rapid application delivery alongside a high-capacity 4-drive SAS ZFS RAID pool for bulk data retention.
Hypervisor Administration: Deployed and actively manage Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment). Successfully allocated resources to prevent hypervisor bottlenecks, tuning vCPUs, memory ballooning, and ZFS ARC limits to ensure zero CPU wait time across multiple intensive workloads.
Network Security & Routing (OPNsense): Virtualized an OPNsense firewall instance within the Proxmox environment to serve as the primary network gateway. Configured core routing protocols, DHCP services, and secure GUI access interfaces to logically isolate and protect local VM infrastructure.
Zero-Trust Networking: Augmented edge security by implementing a “Zero Trust” architecture using Tailscale (WireGuard encapsulation) alongside OPNsense, allowing secure, remote access to server resources without exposing public ports. Managed local file sharing protocols (SMB/Samba) with strict read/write access controls.
Service Deployment & Media Automation Linux Systems Administration: Provisioned and tuned an Ubuntu Server Virtual Machine (VM) tailored for high-performance application hosting. Managed containerized applications using CasaOS as a centralized dashboard.
Database & Application Optimization: Deployed Shoko Server, actively managing its SQLite/MySQL database across the SSD array to mitigate I/O wait times and maximize throughput. Continuously optimized worker threads and hash concurrency to process massive backlogs of over 1,400 tasks efficiently.
Hardware Transcoding:Configured Jellyfin media server to utilize specialized NVIDIA NVENC/NVDEC chips for hardware-accelerated 4K video transcoding, dramatically reducing CPU overhead.
Local AI & Machine Learning Deployment GPU Virtualization: Successfully configured bare-metal PCI Passthrough in Proxmox, granting the Ubuntu VM direct access to a pooled 12GB of VRAM across dual GPUs (NVIDIA Quadro P4000 and GTX 1650).
Private LLM Hosting: Deployed Ollama locally via the Linux terminal to run open-source Large Language Models (like Llama 3). Demonstrated a strong understanding of data sovereignty and isolation by keeping AI processing entirely on-premises rather than relying on external cloud APIs.
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im a linux beginner, studying how linux distro is built internally. im building my own while learning.
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@Itachixkurosaki Between school and your activities, that is quite a list.
Perhaps when you have more time you could pick one or two of those activities and create a topic or article and discuss them in detail. I believe that would be quite interesting. Meanwhile, welcome back; I’ve been out of town myself visiting my daughter and my grandson!
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I think my career may look funny and curious.
Metalworker at my sixteen, woodworker somewhat later, student and post-graduate student on industrial automation, sapper lieutenant, columnist/stringer on IT at weekly newspaper, computer graphics (3d/2d animation and ads) artist at private TV company, software developer, Windows/Linux server and IT infrastructure administrator, network administrator, deputy IT CEO, IS CEO at financial…
Really funny, eh?
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Me here imagining how much money I would save if I had even just a little of this experience! 
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@ugnvs That is a very impressive collection of skills! I hope you’ve enjoyed the many things you have done. I know when you rise to the level of CEO of any kind the “money” is usually “there”. A better question is if it’s funny that you can do all of that, and are you still enjoying what you do? Hopefully the answer is a resounding yes and that you resonate well with the people you lead. Hopefully that is the case because you have such a broad background!
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Thank you!
I think it is funny because I surprised myself having followed that track at all 
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As a “boss” do you get any decent opportunities to chat with “average” employees? Some of the best leaders I’ve seen during my past career did enjoy interacting with others, but meetings and stuff like that did tend to limit those opportunities to either quarterly meetings or encounters at the “coffee nooks”!
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Yes, I do have and I do. Frankly, the team is not that large. Due to the fact I am as much a manager as a player. And managerial activities not that often demand more than a half of my time.
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Dominic, we’re still happy to have you around. When you have that bootable image working, tell us a story about your adventure if you can spare a few minutes of your time. Best wishes in getting that bootable image working.
@markjason I wish you success. I’m glad to read that you are studying about how Linux is built internally. The more you learn the better you’ll do.
In the mid 1990s (yes, decades ago), I read as much about Linux as I could, then I went to a bookstore, looking for a good, in depth book about installing a solid Linux system. I read it, earmarked and notated a number of things before trying it, and when I did so I had success in my first attempt. Granted I was already a senior software engineer working in a UNIX Operating Systems group at the time of doing this; I did not build kernels, but I did check in localization and internationalization code, mostly either defect updates to the I18N stuff or additional locales that I checked in to our code base after working closely with language translators to do the language and user interface changes. I also wrote tools to expedite this process, so that learning was fairly applicable to my Linux inauguration.
I hope whatever you’re doing helps you to gain a really solid understanding; best wishes!
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Eugene, that’s awesome. In that case you must love your job!
Congratulations on your numerous accomplishments and your friendly, helpful attitude. Often these characteristics are as useful as other skills; if you have these, plus the attributes you clearly have, you are a “rock star” in everything you do! Glad you mentioned this; huge hurrah!
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Will do, I have a personal investment into trying to get it working since I can use the said image to fix my own mistakes.
Because it will happen regrettably.
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Hello everyone. I work in IT and have been for the last 20 years. I started off in healthcare IT and then moved on to other various industries ranging from a global real estate investment firm to local small MSPs. For the last 10 years I’ve ended back in healthcare IT and currently am a SysAdmin that manages servers for hospitals all over the US. My first distro I ever touched is Debian. I have a pretty nice home lab with a 3 node ESXi cluster that I use to learn and keep my skills sharp while hosting some things for my personal use. I run various different distros in my home lab such as Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, Fedora, Rocky, and obviously ESXi. I don’t really have an all-time favorite distro, but I do lean heavily on the Debian based ones. I have a Docker Swarm cluster running on Ubuntu and another one running on RedHat. I’m comparing the two I suppose but it’s been fun learning Docker and Linux.
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Welcome! 20 years in IT and a 3 node ESXi cluster at home, you’ll fit right in here.
Curious how the Red Hat Docker Swarm compares to Ubuntu for you, especially with Red Hat pushing Podman so hard. Looking forward to seeing you around the forum! 