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 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.
I have done many things in my career, I got my first systems engineer role for a small company who was at the fore front of Fiber Optics revolution and the implementation of it in the work place.
My predecessor decided to put all of the vital roles for the company on one system which was a cobalt appliance. 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. I had to rebuild the whole infrastructure, Email, 2 File Servers, 2 DCs (Windows Server 2000 mind you), an app server for Autocad, and a few other small things it took me from Friday afternoon 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 Data Center 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 Linux and all the services there-in as well-as customer service and the importance of keeping things running from those guys and they were the most awesome Systems Engineers and dayum they were very good at what they do/did.
From 2008 til now, I have been working mostly in the Infrastructure Space, with a little CI/CD Pipeline (Kubernetes/Docker) & Virtualization Proxmox, VMWare, The only cloud stuff that I have done to this point is SmartOS/Azure type of stuff. (If you want to call that cloud) and I do have a real good handle on it and how it works. I just don’t have a ton of hands on experience with it. 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 22 SBCs, 4 HP EliteDesk minis w/32 gb of ram 8 cores for my virtualization experiements and I also have (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 the community and I am hoping to help some of you youngins’ get started on your way in an IT future. Please visit our Discord Server. 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