1. Introduction

Hello! My name is Brent Saner, and I have a passion for technology. I don’t mean I enjoy playing with the latest gadgets, I mean a passion.

I read RFCs and man pages for fun (so much so that I wrote an RFC client - before I found out that the IETF already has several, oops). I have a large amount of projects I work on in my free time. I have a VM lab (almost a necessity if one works from home), and my home network is segmented into five different VLANs, four different WLANs tied to a unique VLAN each, on-site and remote backups, PXE-bootstrapped iPXE, with 10Gbps house backbone using 802.1X backed by RADIUS and LDAP, all with a full x86_64 Linux 1U as my border device. For a home network.

When I say "passion", I mean it.

With this, combined with my 18 years of professional Linux/UNIX experience (21 years hobbyist), I’ve learned a few tricks around the ol' rodeo. Because of my adherence to and knowledge of best practices, care for forward-thinking, and sheer joy I take in solving potentially difficult problems, it is my goal (and particular knack) to get your company’s infrastructure and services smooth and stable while retaining flexibility for vast growth.

(If you are looking for my résumé instead, which is much more succinct, that can be found here.)

2. Values

In my professional environment, I value and demonstrate the following:

2.1. "SSP"

Security, safety, and privacy.

These concepts are paramount for both employees/coworkers/clients and customers. By holding these concepts in mind during all stages of a project or product’s lifecycle, I believe that other areas (flexibility, economic growth, etc.) become much more achievable.

2.2. Timing

Deadlines should be accurate and followed. This allows for a smoother development, deployment, and consumer satisfaction level.

When determining deadlines and when developing or deploying quality comes first, quantity second, and "quickness" third. Efficiency is not efficient if it creates more work down the road at the cost of speed.

2.3. Do it Right, Do it Once

By following a procedure and policy that allow for testing during development and deployment and by implementing automation into that cycle, it allows for reducing/avoiding technical debt by paving the road for:

  • Deploying correctly the first time

  • Extensive planning

  • Future-proofing

This is accomplished by a strong focus on:

  • Separate Dev, Test/Staging, and Production environments

    • Scalability

2.4. Stability

In the modern technological world of failover and redundancy, stability and availability of a service hold priority over individual machines' uptime.

Because of this, I value balancing load/resources, deploying strong failover procedures, clear priority levels/SLA and clear communication with consumers when affected.

3. Professional Skills

As this is only a bird’s-eye view, please instead review my technical experience if you wish to see technical specifics.

  • Highly autonomous, self-motivated, experienced, and skilled in remote/telecommuting environment

    • 10+ consecutive years of telecommuting experience

    • Strong written and verbal skills

    • Dedicated home office and desire to maintain work/personal life separate

  • Well-versed in *nix server administration, maintenance, deployment (18+ years professional experience)

  • Documentation (Markdown, Asciidoc, etc.)

  • Architecture

    • Deploying, designing, etc.

  • Emergency Mitigation/Maintenance

    • Downtime management

    • Root cause determination

    • Future mitigation design

  • Incorporating best practices to ensure interoperability, safety/security, stability

    • Implementing RFC recommendations (e.g. MUST and MAY directives)

    • Seeking current advisement from upstream documentation and notices

    • Applying new security discoveries as applicable to already deployed projects

4. Technical Experience

Below you will find various technologies I have experience with and, where applicable, specific software/implementations/features I have used directly.

Both have signifiers denoting my level of experience and/or familiarity with them, classified as:

  1. Beginner, some/a marginal understanding/level of working experience with

  2. Intermediate, strong working knowledge

  3. Advanced, I could probably quote you some RFC/documentation details on it (or beyond)

This is, of course, by no means exhaustive and anything below Beginner is not listed. I’m always open to learning new technologies as well.

  • HTTP/HTTPS/HTTP2 (Advanced)

    • Nginx (Advanced)

    • Apache (Intermediate to Advanced)

  • Mail (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • SMTP/SMTPS/StartTLS SMTP (Advanced)

      • Postfix (Intermediate)

    • IMAP/IMAPS/StartTLS IMAP (Advanced)

      • Dovecot (Advanced)

    • DKIM (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • OpenDKIM (Intermediate)

    • Spam Mitigation (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • SPF (Advanced)

      • RBL (Advanced)

      • SpamAssassin (Intermediate to Advanced)

  • VoIP/Telephony (Beginner to Intermediate)

    • SIP and POTS (Beginner to Intermediate)

      • Asterisk (Intermediate)

      • FreeSWITCH (Beginner)

  • Database Management (Intermediate)

    • MySQL (Intermediate)

    • MariaDB (Intermediate)

    • Postgres (Beginner)

    • Sqlite (Intermediate to Advanced)

  • Authentication/Identity (Intermediate)

    • RADIUS (Intemediate to Advanced)

      • FreeRADIUS (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • LDAP (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • OpenLDAP (Intermediate to Advanced)

        • OLC ("On-Line Configuration") (Advanced)

        • StartTLS (Advanced; e.g. SSF and ACL tied to TLS status)

        • "back-ldap" (internal LDAP proxying) (Intermediate)

  • Scripting (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • Bash (Intermediate)

    • Python (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • Golang (Beginner to Intermediate)

  • Linux (Advanced)

    • CentOS/Red Hat (Advanced)

    • Debian (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • Arch Linux (Advanced)

    • Gentoo (Advanced)

  • UNIX/UNIX-likes (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • OpenBSD (Intermediate)

    • FreeBSD (Intermediate)

    • NetBSD (Beginner)

    • OpenSolaris (and derivatives e.g. Illumos) (Beginner)

  • Virtualization (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • XEN (Intermediate)

    • OpenVZ/Virtuozzo (Intermediate)

    • Libvirt + KVM/QEMU (Intermediate to Advanced)

  • Network Analysis (Intermediate)

    • PCAP Format (Intermediate)

      • Tcpdump (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • Wireshark (Intermediate)

    • NetFlow (via FlowTools) (Beginner)

  • Hardware (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • Assembly/Part Replacement (Advanced)

    • Diagnostics (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • Repair (Intermediate to Advanced)

  • Configuration/Change Management (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • Ansible (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • SaltStack (Advanced)

  • Networking Concepts (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • DNS (Advanced)

      • PowerDNS (Advanced)

      • DNSMasq (Advanced)

      • Unbound (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • VPN (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • IPsec (both IKEv1 and IKEv2) (Intermediate to Advanced)

        • StrongSwan (Advanced)

      • OpenVPN (Advanced)

      • PPTP (Intermediate)

    • IPv4 (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • RFC 1918 subnetting/CIDR allocation (Advanced)

      • DHCP (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • ICMP (Intermediate)

    • IPv6 (Intermediate)

      • ICMPv6 (Intermediate)

      • SLAAC/Router Advertisements (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • DHCPv6 (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • PXE (Advanced)

      • iPXE (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • QoS (Quality of Service) (Beginner to Intermediate)

    • IEEE 802.1X (Intermediate)

    • "Smart"/managed switching (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • VLAN tagging (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • Port Mirroring (Intermediate)

      • PoE Device Management (Intermediate)

    • Firewalling (Intermediate to Advanced)

      • Traffic flow, policies, other concepts (Advanced)

      • netfilter/iptables (Intermediate)

      • netfilter/ip6tables (Intermediate)

  • Documentation

    • MediaWiki (Intermediate)

    • AsciiDoc/AsciiDoctor (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • Markup (Advanced)

  • Data

    • XML (and XML Schema) (Intermediate to Advanced)

    • JSON (Advanced)

    • YAML (Advanced)

    • INI (Avanced)

5. Professional Experience Highlights

  • Foxyproxy (Contractor; Linux Systems Administrator, Linux Systems Engineer) (Fully Remote), March 2014 to present (6.5+ years)

    • Consolidated customer-facing server count from 1500+ to ~750 in underutilized clusters

    • Reduced infrastructure costs by ~75%

    • Redesigned several platforms for GDPR compliance

    • Designed a SSO (Single Sign-On) backend/architecture for customers

    • Re-architectured an authentication scheme for a global service to use centralized authentication with bandwidth accounting

  • A Small Orange (Support Representative, Support Supervisor, Linux Systems Administrator) (Fully Remote), September 2011 to Feb 2014 (~2.5 years)

    • Redesigned PXE for dedicated server network:

      • Expanding operating system diversity

      • Implementing low-level hardware diagnostics

      • improving existing install options

      • Increasing service stability

    • Proposed and deployed live phone customer support via SIP leading to increased responsiveness to customer requests

  • Barrister Global Services Network (Hardware diagnostician), August 2010 to September 2011 (~1 year)

    • Redesigned flow of call handling, allowing to handle an increased ~200% resolution volume in faster timeframes

    • Created bootable ISO for field technicians to quickly diagnose issues and report results to triage

  • Tektonic (Linux Systems Administrator), June 2008 to October 2009 (~1.3 years)

    • Managed, maintained, installed ~1000 OpenVZ and Virtuozzo containers

  • ACE Technology Group (Support Technician, NOC Admin) August 2007 to November 2008 (1.25 years)

    • Remotely supported ~150 offices

    • Maintained in-house VoIP system (Asterisk)

    • Maintained OpenVPN bridge between NOC and client offices

6. Samples of Work

Since I focus more on operations/administration than development, most of my "samples" can be found via administration theory. This is expounded upon a great deal in my podcast.

Occasionally, however, I write documentation for other Linux sysadmins. Samples of these can be found here:

However, I do have a lot of Python (and some Bash) written. Examples include:

Please note that I only use GitHub for mirroring of select repositories; a full collection of all of my public repositories can be found here.

7. Personal

7.1. Community Involvement

  • Hosts and runs a Systems Operations podcast, Sysadministrivia, for 6 years ongoing

    • Maintains accompanying community of other IT professionals

  • Engineered, maintained NOC and designed firmware for a community/volunteer-driven city-wide WiFi project (Project.Phree) for 1 year (now defunct)

  • Have volunteered for/participated in and raised funds for the Extra Life children’s health charity in 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2020.

  • Have volunteed Systems Support for the 2020 TASGiving charity event (benefiting NAMI)

7.2. Hobbies

A list of interests and hobbies (outside of technology) in no particular order, should it make sifting through CVs more amusing for you.

  • Music

    • I’m all over the place with genres I listen to. Ask me about a major genre and I’ll probably at least have one piece of work in it that I’m fond of.

    • Playing instruments:

      • Banjo

      • Didgeridoo

  • Reading

    • Favourites include Horror/surrealism (Robert Shea, Marc Laidlaw) and sci-fi (Ray Bradbury)

  • Games

    • The classic PC FPSes: Unreal, Half-Life, Doom, Quake, etc. (Am I old?)

    • The occasional tabletop RPG (Call of Cthulhu, Risus)

  • Film

    • Horror. The cheesier the better.

    • Similarly, MST3K

8. Contact Information

You can reach me via:

  1. Email

  2. LinkedIn (not frequently used)

9. References

(As this document is publicly indexed, in order to protect the privacy of those I respect professionally and care about personally, references are only available upon request. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.)