echo "HELLO WORLD"I am a career System Administrator, MSP Owner, and Tech Enthusiast. From a young age I was always looking for tech, new and old, to get my hands on to learn how it worked and see what I could run. For example, one of my first servers was an IA32 rack server running CentOS - one of the early exposures to a Linux environment I had. Due to the failure of IA32 and there being very little software that would actually run on this architecture, this forced me to learn how different architectures work, and also began a secondary spiral into computer science and understanding what the components in hardware actually did. My interest in learning how these systems worked led me down a path of spending hours tearing down any computer I could get my hands on and using whatever parts I could to build better and faster servers, learning the entire time about how different hardware may interact with each other.
After spending all this time building servers and getting to know how hardware worked, I started to accumulate hardware that wasn't doing much. So I started to ask myself the million dollar Home Lab question: "Now that I have these servers, what should I run on them?". As I was already penny pinching when it came to hardware, expensive operating systems like Windows Server were not much of an option for me at a young age, so I started to seek cheaper and free alternatives. Remembering my experience with CentOS, I started to research further about Linux and what I could do with it. I began spinning up servers like it was going out of style. I started with some simple web servers to host simple web pages I was making, running multiple game servers for my friends, and getting involved in the early folding community. As I started running more and more applications, I started to look for better solutions to manage it all.
My research led me to hypervisors and virtual environments. The first one I tried out was VMWare's ESXi. At the time it was one of the coolest things I have had ever seen! The concept of running dozens of applications on the same hardware at the same time in their own pools was the perfect solution to this problem! At this point I was well into High School and had been pulling all-nighters experimenting with different operating systems on different servers. I was running straight down the list on Distro Watch and downloading every Linux ISO I saw, uploading to my server, and spinning a VM up to experiment with different Linux OSs. Then, by mistake, I had downloaded Proxmox as it was listed on Distro Watch. When I had started the VM to see what it was, I was blown away that I just found an Open Source, Debian based, Hypervisor platform. I immediately installed the ISO to a flash drive to overwrite my ESXi install on my server and being learning a new Hypervisor.
From here, things stayed the same for a while as I was just using the server I had built for mostly running game servers. This was, until, I was lucky enough to have one of my teachers watching over my shoulder as I was navigating Linux terminals in my study time. I was asked what it was I was doing. I didn't realize this at the time but from that point I started to build a valuable skill of explaining low-level technical concepts to people who may not have the same level of understanding as I had. My teacher was somewhat impressed with what I was talking about and had mentioned the conversation to someone I am still in contact with today: the Technology Director of the school district. She had asked to see me one day, and had asked if I would have interest in participating in a Technology Conference hosted by PDS (Paragon Development Systems). They are a company who focused on creating custom server solutions for companies like HP.
Again, without even knowing, I was building skills that would get me to where I am today. I met a Technology Directory of HP, who happened to know my Uncle who was a patent attorney who worked with HP, shook hands with Malcom Gladwel, and Met the Chief Solutions Architecht at PDS who then introduced me to some of the staff that worked in their Development Lab. The staff I was talking to seemed to be rather impressed with the projects I was working on at such a young age. So much so they extended an invite to me to work with them one-on-one in their Lab in Madison WI to get access to enterprise virtual environments and lean about large scale computing. I accepted eagerly and stayed in contact with them until the first summer came and I got to meet them again in their lab. I got to do this for my final summer as a student as well. After I had graduated High School, the intern opportunity was over, and it was time to choose what future path I wanted to pursue.
I was offered a role at PDS, but being in a different City than where I was and between my full-time job I already had, I respectfully declined. A few years had started to pass. In this time I was mostly focused on my newly found post-high school freedoms. Getting first cars, moving out, making money, that kind of stuff. I still maintained my small home lab and in some free time would tinker. I also picked up a few web development jobs and began hosting some websites. Until COVID hit...
Leading up to COVID, I started getting involved in streaming as it seemed like a lot of fun. Between this and my low cost of living, when I lost my job during the pandemic - I wasn't too worried. I was able to continue to support myself from the income from streaming and suddenly had a vast amount of free time again. I doubled down on my home lab and started spending huge amounts of time, day and night, learning again. I changed my angle to windows network management and other IT style management outlets in order to be potentially useful to corporate IT departments should the streaming thing not work out long term.
While doing this I started to create my new website and post on social media about being able to work with companies to provide IT services. In less than a month, I was working gig after gig helping individuals and small businesses find IT solutions to their technical problems. In the background while this was going on, I was also putting out resumes with my home lab project and other gig work on it to find a company that might be willing to work with someone that doesn't have formal IT education. After about a year of searching, I ended up landing a part time technology consultation job with an 11-location public accounting firm. After another year of that part-time job they wanted to bring me on board full-time as their Lead System Administrator to fully manage all their locations and assist with a massive cloud migration project.
Working for this company, did more for me that provide a critical stepping stone in my career. It also massively widened my network. As I did not engage with many of the clients directly, the people that did - other employees, did. As they interacted with clients, often clients would mention they were having some sort of technology issue and these people would recommend they reach out to me directly for on demand IT support. Before I knew it, I had built a massive roster of clients myself that I was doing IT work for regularly. As this developed, I began to see a massive opportunity.
I started to research what kind of services MSPs offer and what I could do to offer MSP level service for the least amount of cost possible. I started to put together a plan to uniformly manage these regular IT requests I was getting. Armed with a fresh website, an Open Source ticketing system, Open Source RMM, Open source AV + XDR + Threat Management, Inexpensive backup solutions, and some of the best hardware on the market, I put my sales hat on and began reaching out to my network to sell managed IT solutions. To this date, I have 5 managed clients and one employee.
As time went on, we started to get the public accounting firm in a completed spot as far as their technology projects were completed. I started to look elsewhere for full-time work to keep funding my MSP I was starting up. I ended up becoming a first responder for an ambulance company and now also provide System Administration for private EMS.
