Bill the Wizard
=====================

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 3
   :caption: Contents:
   :hidden:

   
   Art.md
   Biography.md
   devops/index.rst
   linux/index.rst
   
Nerd, Father, Legend.
----------------------

.. image:: images/profile/wizard.jpg
   :width: 300pt

Musings, documentation, art, and more by the Bill the Wizard.

The Dream
__________
I would love to run a cluster of hypervisors for non-profit educational purposes. I
dream of co-op computer lab with private cloud, enterprise networking, and training
workshops.

The systems I create will create enormous value to society through making industry standard
computing resources available to eduational centers with shoe-string budgets. Imagine a
non-profit computing co-op where people invest in ensuring that everyone has the opportunity
to engage with exciting technology in a supportive environment.

Of course, it takes more than a visionary and devops professional to accomplish this initiative:
The Wizard Lab. Thus, it remains a dream waiting for the opportunity to actualize.

I have had the honor to work with students in an IT training capacity: it was truly engaging
work. I loved helping people do more with computers. However, the salary for an educator
has hard constraints. Furthermore, better funded institutions struggle to tailor their
IT infrastructure to education purposes. 

Working in education, you rail against IT security policies, at a detriment to learning. As
a network instructor, it took several phone calls and e-mails to resolve objections to a piece
of amazing software that was unfortunate enough to be named "Packet Tracer." Having performed
system administration at-scale from the ground up, I understand the work that goes into
having software installed and configured properly; it's not something that scales without
effort. Security trumps everything.

Education can't be that way. We have the technology to provide hands-on access to rich learning
experiences with computers, but having a student plugging a server into a switch and setting up their
own webserver on the internet sounds like a security nightmare.

I want to create a facility where people can invest in access to industry standard power and cooling.
Along with my techno-wizard parters, we operate the firewall inside and out of our datacenter, 
assist in racking, accessorizing, connecting, and monitoring your servers. If you need help building 
a small-scale private cloud, I could build you a reliable and scaleable system for the best value 
possible, investing in gear along with patrons, understanding that the equipment will be upcycled into
a fleet of storage servers when the chassis reaches EOL.

We would provide affordable consulting and training services, along with
guidance on configuration management. It's not having a managed service provider. Rather, it's investing
in a community partner organization to provide the flexibility and support where you need it.

It's just a beautiful dream.

Integrating an isolated training\development environment into production infrastructure
requires dedicated configuration that needs to be looked after. Having lots of users means
needing a lot of infrastructure services. 

Providing access to computing resources is dominated by the large cloud providers for good reason, 
but theres another way. Keep your testing/training environments separate doesn't mean giving a
blank check to a multi-billion dollar company in exchange for security peace-of-mind.

I can build a small openstack cluster for under $50,000. I would like to start Wizard Lab with 
enough gear to host 10 of these clusters, with a substantial storage cluster to kickstart on-premise
backup and recovery operations. Networking equipment is expensive, but good Cisco gear is a
beautiful thing to see in action. 

I anticipate needing $300,000 for the networking gear. Having lots of 10G interfaces avaiable is
expensive, but we will need capacity for deploying high end HPC switching for projects that need 
low-latency data transfer between nodes, or to facilitate rapid virtual server migration between 
hypervisors. EOL top of rack switches will serve well in creating the density requires for a sizeable
storage cluster. If managed carefully, well ventilated switches can operate for years past their
vendor-support date. Using Ceph, I can scale my storage solution as demand grows. Idealy, we could
provide enough storage to manage full-machine backups and short/medium term data storage services.

$500,000 is a lot of money, but I would aim to build 5 high performance file servers running multiple
ceph pools, with migration between the performance tier storage and a larger/slower capacity storage.
Instead of deleting all those experiments, you can send them to the capacity tier, saving low-latency
storage for applications/experiments that feel it worst: remote desktops, scaled-up database-insensive
web applications, anything involving getting work off of a GPU, etc.

Working with Ceph, managing a medium scale storage cluster is doable, and I have the skills to do
it right now. I just need $500,000 and a air conditioned room to roll some racks into.

I really do love my work, and I know what I post here will never be read by anyone, but I
just felt like sharing my dream. If anyone out in the void has a few million dollars to invest in
a wild computer dude who wants to give others the opportunity to explore technology in a
safe space hosted by the Wizard himself, please let me know.

The Work
_________
I work as a System and Network Administrator for a Public University. Our small team of Administrators manage 150+ Desktop systems, infrastructure hosts, and a range of workloads.

We deploy onto baremetal, virtual machines, and containers. My specialized role on the team is Network administration, but I participate in a wide range of projects including infrastructure monitoring,
public documentation, hardware troubleshooting, and the delivery of various networked services. Lately, I have learned how to manage both Linux and Windows systems with Ansible.

From my Linux workstation, I can image and configure lab machines in either Windows or Linux, at scale. I manage network equipment, host network configuration, and network services with SSH and Ansible.

Wizardlab
__________
I share my personal training/development environment on Github. In my code,
I deploy virtual machines, and I automate configuration of services; this
collection of code serves as a repository of system administration ideas,
testing ground for new configuration, and display of my skill development.

Learn more about `Wizardlab`_

Prior to working for the University, I taught Linux and Cisco Networking for Job Corps as the 
instructor/designer of their "Advanced IT" trade. We had three hypervisor clusters: one 4 node VMware
vSphere cluster with vCenter for studying Windows System Administration, a 3 node ProxMox cluster
for hosting our homebrew Guacamole\Ubuntu VDI solution, and two Hyper-V servers for hosting our own
Active Directory infrastructure.

We had isolated Virtual LANs that hook up to our physical lab infrastructure, and old
Dell workstations setup with a Cisco 2960 access switch. Students could set their own on-premise
domains, configure users, manage group policy, and explore Windows networking in the context of
Cisco gear. I built these systems and tried to start up an amazing training program.

Unfortunately, I as a classroom instructor with a handful of students was responsible for engineering,
designing, promoting, and delivering a bunch of content daily: while doing attendance and managing
the classroom (supervising, policing workplace standards, documenting progress, cleaning the restrooms).

It was a lot of anonymous work for a for-profit corporation paid me too little to do, but
I sunk my heart into that work, and I hope to have the chance to do good work like that in the
future.

Why Bill the Wizard?
---------------------
Computers and networking technologies drive solutions to problems in our daily lives,
yet the goal of our implementations with these technologies center around making them as 
transparent to the end user as possible. The work is all about making the things happen 
"automagically." The end-user wants to click a link and have all of these amazing things
happen, without needing insight into the underlying configuration that's necessary to do the thing.

What we're talking about here is "configuration management" a.k.a the System Admin's best friend.
Without configuration management, we need to log into individual computers interactively, 
run the commands, click through the menus, and hope we set things up consistently from one computer
to the next.

With configuration management, we can run a script and everything is ready to go: with a neat report
spit to our console telling us about how well things went. If you need to set up 40 computers in less
than a hour, it's the only way to do it.

I strive to be someone who understands things at this level: a wizard. Someone who invokes daemons and memorizes incantations. There is always more to learn. Things change over time, both subtle changes and major re-imaginings of entire system processes.Mastering the art of System Administration is site 
specific, Operating System specific, scale-specific, network specific, and user demands change over 
time: week to week, month to month, day-to-day, and hour-to-hour.

Managing a collection of computer systems is really fun. A customized faculty research workstation 
requires a different touch than a general purpose lab machine. Infrastructure hosts require a whole 
other skillset. Managing all of these systems in concert is a study of the art of system administration.

I understand that I'll toil for decades learning these things, and I am fine with that.

Teacher and Computer/Network Professional
-------------------------------------------
I had a 10 year career as an educator before changing fields to work as a IT System Admin. 
After College, I taught Adult Basic Education Mathematics for Job Corps. After about 4 years, 
our campus shut down between contractors, and I went to work as an Elementary teacher.

After teaching 5th and 6th grade for the two years, I went back to work at Job Corps as an 
IT instructor. I supervised studies in Game Development, Web Development, Graphic Design, 
Computer Help Desk, Networking, and Linux System Administration. During my tenure as an IT 
instructor, I achieved CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, and Linux+, and the Cisco CCNA in June 2022.

.. _Wizardlab: devops/Wizardlab.html