bts@square-r00t.net | +1 (504) 338-1513 | Lehigh Valley area, PA

1. Introduction

Hello! My name is Brent Saner, and I have a passion for technology. I don’t mean I enjoy playing with the latest gadgets, I mean a passion.

With this, combined with my 18 years of professional Linux/UNIX experience (21 years hobbyist), I’ve learned a few tricks around the ol' rodeo. Because of my adherence to and knowledge of best practices, care for forward-thinking, and sheer joy I take in solving potentially difficult problems, it is my goal (and particular knack) to get your company’s infrastructure and services smooth and stable while retaining flexibility for vast growth.

(If you are looking for my curriculum vitae (CV) instead, which contains much more detail, that can be found here.)

2. Professional Skills

As this is only a bird’s-eye view, please instead review my technical experience if you wish to see technical specifics.

  • Highly autonomous, self-motivated, experienced, and skilled in remote/telecommuting environment

    • 10+ consecutive years of telecommuting experience

    • Strong written and verbal skills

    • Dedicated home office and desire to maintain work/personal life separate

  • Well-versed in *nix server administration, maintenance, deployment (18+ years professional experience)

  • Documentation (Markdown, Asciidoc, etc.)

  • Architecture

    • Deploying, designing, etc.

  • Emergency Mitigation/Maintenance

    • Downtime management

    • Root cause determination

    • Future mitigation design

  • Incorporating best practices to ensure interoperability, safety/security, stability

    • Implementing RFC recommendations (e.g. MUST and MAY directives)

    • Seeking current advisement from upstream documentation and notices

    • Applying new security discoveries as applicable to already deployed projects

3. Professional Experience Highlights

  • Foxyproxy (Contractor; Linux Systems Administrator, Linux Systems Engineer) (Fully Remote), March 2014 to present (6.5+ years)

    • Consolidated customer-facing server count from 1500+ to ~750 in underutilized clusters

    • Reduced infrastructure costs by ~75%

    • Redesigned several platforms for GDPR compliance

    • Designed a SSO (Single Sign-On) backend/architecture for customers

    • Re-architectured an authentication scheme for a global service to use centralized authentication with bandwidth accounting

  • A Small Orange (Support Representative, Support Supervisor, Linux Systems Administrator) (Fully Remote), September 2011 to Feb 2014 (~2.5 years)

    • Redesigned PXE for dedicated server network:

      • Expanding operating system diversity

      • Implementing low-level hardware diagnostics

      • improving existing install options

      • Increasing service stability

    • Proposed and deployed live phone customer support via SIP leading to increased responsiveness to customer requests

  • Barrister Global Services Network (Hardware diagnostician), August 2010 to September 2011 (~1 year)

    • Redesigned flow of call handling, allowing to handle an increased ~200% resolution volume in faster timeframes

    • Created bootable ISO for field technicians to quickly diagnose issues and report results to triage

  • Tektonic (Linux Systems Administrator), June 2008 to October 2009 (~1.3 years)

    • Managed, maintained, installed ~1000 OpenVZ and Virtuozzo containers

  • ACE Technology Group (Support Technician, NOC Admin) August 2007 to November 2008 (1.25 years)

    • Remotely supported ~150 offices

    • Maintained in-house VoIP system (Asterisk)

    • Maintained OpenVPN bridge between NOC and client offices

4. Samples of Work

Since I focus more on operations/administration than development, most of my "samples" can be found via administration theory. This is expounded upon a great deal in my podcast.

Occasionally, however, I write documentation for other Linux sysadmins. Samples of these can be found here:

However, I do have a lot of Python (and some Bash) written. Examples include:

Please note that I only use GitHub for mirroring of select repositories; a full collection of all of my public repositories can be found here.

5. Personal

5.1. Hobbies

  • Music

    • I’m all over the place with genres I listen to. Ask me about a major genre and I’ll probably at least have one piece of work in it that I’m fond of.

    • Playing instruments:

      • Banjo

      • Didgeridoo

  • Reading

    • Favourites include Horror/surrealism (Robert Shea, Marc Laidlaw) and sci-fi (Ray Bradbury)

  • Games

    • The classic PC FPSes: Unreal, Half-Life, Doom, Quake, etc. (Am I old?)

    • The occasional tabletop RPG (Call of Cthulhu, Risus)

  • Film

    • Horror. The cheesier the better.

    • Similarly, MST3K