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Linux Pathfinder

About me

Who writes these guides, and the production work they come out of.

Welcome to Linux Pathfinder. I built this site and I still run it, over 10 years into a career spent on Linux systems administration, DevOps and cloud infrastructure.

It started with open source. I liked that you could open something up, see how it worked, and fix it yourself instead of filing a ticket and waiting. That curiosity turned into a job. The job took me across a handful of industries, building and running Linux environments and talking teams into DevOps practices back when most of them weren’t sold on the idea.

What this site is for

Sharing what I’ve worked out the hard way. So much of this job is harder than it needs to be, and usually that’s the documentation’s fault, because it assumes you already know the answer you came looking for. I’d rather write the explanation I wish I’d found at 2am.

Helping people has never felt one-sided to me. Writing something up forces me to actually understand it, properly, not just well enough to get it working once. And the questions that come back teach me things I’d have missed on my own. Plenty of people land here chasing one specific answer, find it, and leave. That’s fine. That’s the point.

Professional Background

The title on paper is Cloud Expert, Architect, and DevOps & Linux System Administrator, which is a mouthful and doesn’t tell you much. In practice it breaks down like this:

  • System Architecture: Designing systems that stay up. Availability and scale are the easy words for it. The real work is the failure modes nobody thought to plan for.
  • Cloud Infrastructure: Building things that were designed for cloud, rather than lifting a data centre into one and wondering why the bill looks like that.
  • Automation & Security: Automating the repetitive parts, with security in from the beginning instead of bolted on after somebody fails an audit.
  • DevOps Toolchain: The whole chain. Provisioning, orchestration, CI/CD, microservices. Most of it I’ve used in anger, on real systems, under real deadlines.

Technical Expertise

Infrastructure & Cloud Platforms

  • Linux DistributionsUbuntuDebianCentOSRedHatFedora
  • Cloud ProvidersAWSGoogle CloudAzureDigitalOceanLinodeIONOS by 1&1SiteGroundVultr
  • Infrastructure as CodeAWS CloudFormationAzure ARMTerraform
  • VirtualizationKVMDockerContainer Orchestration

DevOps & Automation

  • CI/CD PipelinesJenkinsGitHub ActionsGitLab CI/CDBitbucket PipelinesAWS CodePipeline
  • Configuration ManagementAnsibleChefSaltStack
  • Containerization & OrchestrationDockerDocker SwarmKubernetesAWS ECSAWS EKSAWS FargateGKE

Database & Application Services

  • DatabasesAWS RDSMySQLPostgreSQLMongoDBRedisMariaDB
  • Web ServersApacheNginxApache TomcatHAProxy
  • Application StackNode.jsJavaPHPElasticSearch
  • Also: performance tuning, replication, and the migrations nobody wants to do on a Friday

Monitoring & Observability

  • ToolsPrometheusGrafanaELK StackNagiosZabbixAWS CloudWatchNewRelicPRTGMonitCactiMunin
  • Plus: logging, alerting, and the ongoing argument about what actually deserves to wake someone up

Security & Compliance

  • SSL/TLS: Let’s Encrypt automation, CSR generation, and getting HTTPS genuinely right rather than just switched on.
  • Access Control: Security groups, IAM policies, and the thankless work of making sure people have exactly what they need and nothing else.
  • Hardening: Locking servers down, and folding security into the pipeline instead of leaving it as a stage everyone skips when the release is late.

Additional Competencies

  • Project management, plus the process cleanup that always seems to come attached to it
  • Writing documentation, and training people so it actually gets used
  • IT operations and service management
  • Capacity planning, and stopping a cloud bill from quietly doubling
  • Talking to stakeholders without patronising them or vanishing into jargon

Services Offered

This is the consulting side of things. Broadly:

  • DevOps integration and transformation
  • Cloud migration and architecture consulting
  • System administration and infrastructure management
  • CI/CD pipeline design and automation
  • Site reliability engineering
  • Performance optimisation and security hardening

Work with me Or send a quick message

What You’ll Find Here

DevOps and cloud solutions, tutorials, how-to guides, and a fair bit of troubleshooting. Nearly everything here started as something that broke on me at work, so the posts tend to include the parts that went wrong and not just the tidy version that worked on the fourth attempt.

You don’t need to be at any particular level to get something out of it. Sysadmins who’ve been at this for years, DevOps engineers, people who installed their first distro last month. The material spans all of it. Some posts assume more than others, and I try to say so at the top rather than letting you find out halfway down.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a look around, and if something here saves you an afternoon, that’s a good day for both of us.

Find me elsewhere

I post most of what I’m working on across these. GitHub and GitLab have the code. LinkedIn is the best place for anything work-related.