Andy Alexander — Linux Systems and Infrastructure
I got my start in 1996, in high school, at Cardina Internet Group — a dialup ISP in Lapeer, MI, not far from where I grew up in Dryden. I came in on the support desk, but I kept digging into how the systems actually worked, and it wasn't long before I was doing systems administration. I started picking up a bit of everything: shell scripting, sendmail, DNS, and the discipline of not touching production on a Friday afternoon. That early opportunity is a big part of why I ended up spending a career in this stack instead of somewhere else entirely.
Since 2022 I've been running that same discipline at home instead of at an employer — designing, breaking, fixing, and documenting a real multi-site environment because it's the best way I know to keep the skills sharp and prove they're current. This site and the runbooks linked from it are the result: three Proxmox hosts, ZFS storage on TrueNAS SCALE, OPNsense routing over XGS-PON fiber, a WireGuard overlay connecting multiple sites, redundant DNS, and backups that actually get verified. Nothing here is a lab exercise from a course — it's the infrastructure I depend on daily, documented the way I'd want it documented if someone else had to pick it up at 2am.
The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn. My resume — with the full work history — is on this site as well.