Ryan Starr
Junior System Administrator · South West England
I keep infrastructure running, document how it works, and rebuild it when it doesn't.
What I do
I’m a junior system administrator, and no two days look quite the same. On a typical one I’m building out our OpenStack cluster, patching the services already running on it, or fitting new hardware into the rack. When something needs deploying, it goes out through a CI/CD pipeline rather than by hand.
I also look after everything people actually touch day to day: their MacBooks, Wi-Fi, and the kit on their desks. When someone new starts, I’m the one enrolling them into our central user database so they can log in on their first morning.
The services I keep running include GitLab, OpenStack and a fair amount of Docker. I set up our single sign-on service and have been connecting everything else to it, one service at a time, so people have one login instead of a dozen.
The biggest things I’ve built so far are a full OpenStack cluster, taken from start to finish, and a Proxmox cluster backed by Ceph storage.
Stack
- Ansible roles
- CI/CD pipelines
- GitLab
- Bash
- Python
- Git
- Configuration management
- OpenStack
- Linux
- Windows Server
- Server hardware
- Docker
- Kubernetes / K3s
- Proxmox & Ceph
- ESXi
- TrueNAS
- Oracle Cloud
- Firewall rules
- Wi-Fi
- Single sign-on
- Reverse proxy (NGINX)
- VPN (Tailscale)
- pfSense & OPNsense
- Cisco / CCNA-level
- DNS & DHCP
- Patching
- Cyber Essentials
- MacBooks & macOS
- User onboarding
- Active Directory
- Microsoft 365
- Azure fundamentals
- Mobile device management
- Desk hardware
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Uptime Kuma
Recent roles
-
Junior System Administrator
-
IT Engineer (contract)
-
Technical Analyst
The home lab
An OPNsense router, a Proxmox cluster and a TrueNAS server, with an NGINX reverse proxy in front of the services and Tailscale so I can reach them from anywhere. On top of that runs Nextcloud, which holds the family photos, and a voice assistant built from Home Assistant, Ollama, Whisper and Piper, all on my own hardware rather than someone else's cloud. Uptime Kuma keeps an eye on all of my services and pings me on Discord when something fails.
Most of what I know about infrastructure I learned by running this, breaking it, and having to get it back up.
- OPNsense
- Proxmox cluster
- TrueNAS
- NGINX reverse proxy
- Tailscale
- Nextcloud
- Home Assistant
- Ollama
- Whisper
- Piper
- Uptime Kuma
Elsewhere
This is where I keep my CV and how to get hold of me. The longer write-ups — home lab builds, what broke and how I fixed it — are over on The Adventuring Dev.
Same person, different hat. If you've come from there: hello again.