Ian is a SAGE Level II Systems Administrator.

I’m a junior systems administrator working mostly with BSD and Linux systems, especially with Debian, CentOS/RHEL, and OpenBSD. I’m a member of SAGE and LOPSA.

Also, you might be wondering what “SAGE Level II” means: here’s a list of job descriptions from SAGE.

Specializations

I specialize in HPC administration and web services. I’ve also fallen in love recently with modern configuration management tools, such as Puppet and other various tools.

Current Interests in Systems Administration

I’m currently interested in investigating more into self-healing networks and systems; while configuration management tools such as Puppet help to achieve this goal, what if there was an increased demand in a service that “wounds” the system in a way that usually requires manual intervention? What we’d usually do is provision more systems and designate them in Puppet as specific servers; however, can we automate this step so that our tool of choice (or some other new tool) can auto-provision systems when there’s an increased load on our service? (I’d imagine that it’d require monitoring of specific metrics, along with a language that describes what the system should do in order to ease the load requirements; I could at least imagine a scenario when such a self-healing system for, say, a web service, can throw too many slave servers underneath a load balancer, or provision one too many load balancers for the amount of slave hosts.)

About Ian Paredes

I currently work for 3TIER as a systems administrator. I also administer an OpenBSD router for Cafe Allegro with two other volunteer sysadmins. I design a few websites as a hobby with XHTML and CSS, and I occasionally volunteer my time for various nonprofit and academic organizations, such as The Critical Gaming Project and Noise for the Needy. I also program in Ruby as a hobby, and more often than not, they are usually apps on Ruby on Rails.

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