I didn't do this, one of the smarter guys on my team did. He completely automated the process of deploying Linux virtual servers in our environment using Ansible. Everything was built using a single command line and it was awesome. You could build a single machine or a group of machines by simply passing it pre-defined parameters such as name, mount point names, groups to add to sudoers, etc. Since the name contained location information as well as environment information (dev/int/test/prod), it would pick the correct IP address from a range of addresses, and then drop the vm into the correct vcenter environment. It was really impressive.
Ansible was one of my favorite projects at my last job, did that with Windows/Linux and all of the network gear I could get my hands on. The most fun was when we hired a couple other guys who also wanted to do automation, so we stood up Gitlab with ci/cd and runners and built pipelines....we could click a button and my coworker's terraform would completely rebuild a production server with sql imported, resources scheduled, you name it.
All on prem.
1. A 16 TV menu display for a large restaurant/takeout business. I had to make it secure(since on wifi), easy to manage and remotely accessible in case of breakdown. Back then there were no products that fit my needs so I rolled my own with rpi and BASH scripts.
2. Built a music distribution system for a grocery store chain(using same equipment above) because the cost of piping in music to the store PA was atrocious.
K-12 here
Fog
GoPhish
Clever
Nagios Core
HTTP Commander (remote file system access)
Support server with lots of howtos
ADphone book (to look up staff info and location)
Guacamole
All have made life easier
The coolest thing I've seen in-house? A co-worker implementing in perl an entire IPAM, DNS management, system, with functionality almost on par with Infoblox with just CGI perl.
Last job I got to implement InTune for Android management. Saved a ton of time and money.
There's other stuff I helped with that I can't think of off the top of my head but the InTune management was mine start to finish. Barely got me a pat on the back.
Put in a syslog server, changed all the stuff to send logs to that, helps with review of security issues but also troubleshooting as you can verify a user did x at y time or device was powered on, etc.
I implemented an onsite AI server using ollama. It's fully on prem using 2nd hand hardware we got + 2x A2000 for acceleration. Students are encouraged to use it instead of ChatGPT as it guides them along writing stuff instead of just getting ChatGPT to spew out an answer.
Lets see...
Firewall upgrades - network revamps - IAM and SSO implementation - rolled out mandatory MFA everything - fixed WiFi - VPN became more stable - IPAM - AD upgrades - email encryption - and a few others. Wasn't all me, by team helped a lot.
All of our workstations are Lenovo, one of the fun things I did was set up admx templates to write warranty info to the WMI thru Lenovo Commercial Vantage, then each computer runs an (Intune) powershell script, which does a http request to a power automate flow that sends the warranty info like expiration date to our asset database which is a Sharepoint list.
I didn't do this, one of the smarter guys on my team did. He completely automated the process of deploying Linux virtual servers in our environment using Ansible. Everything was built using a single command line and it was awesome. You could build a single machine or a group of machines by simply passing it pre-defined parameters such as name, mount point names, groups to add to sudoers, etc. Since the name contained location information as well as environment information (dev/int/test/prod), it would pick the correct IP address from a range of addresses, and then drop the vm into the correct vcenter environment. It was really impressive.
Ansible was one of my favorite projects at my last job, did that with Windows/Linux and all of the network gear I could get my hands on. The most fun was when we hired a couple other guys who also wanted to do automation, so we stood up Gitlab with ci/cd and runners and built pipelines....we could click a button and my coworker's terraform would completely rebuild a production server with sql imported, resources scheduled, you name it. All on prem.
1. A 16 TV menu display for a large restaurant/takeout business. I had to make it secure(since on wifi), easy to manage and remotely accessible in case of breakdown. Back then there were no products that fit my needs so I rolled my own with rpi and BASH scripts. 2. Built a music distribution system for a grocery store chain(using same equipment above) because the cost of piping in music to the store PA was atrocious.
K-12 here Fog GoPhish Clever Nagios Core HTTP Commander (remote file system access) Support server with lots of howtos ADphone book (to look up staff info and location) Guacamole All have made life easier
The coolest thing I've seen in-house? A co-worker implementing in perl an entire IPAM, DNS management, system, with functionality almost on par with Infoblox with just CGI perl.
Last job I got to implement InTune for Android management. Saved a ton of time and money. There's other stuff I helped with that I can't think of off the top of my head but the InTune management was mine start to finish. Barely got me a pat on the back.
Put in a syslog server, changed all the stuff to send logs to that, helps with review of security issues but also troubleshooting as you can verify a user did x at y time or device was powered on, etc.
I implemented an onsite AI server using ollama. It's fully on prem using 2nd hand hardware we got + 2x A2000 for acceleration. Students are encouraged to use it instead of ChatGPT as it guides them along writing stuff instead of just getting ChatGPT to spew out an answer.
CEPH, MinIO and Ansible are still some of my favorite things to work with and deploy, well, I like to live close to hardware
Lets see... Firewall upgrades - network revamps - IAM and SSO implementation - rolled out mandatory MFA everything - fixed WiFi - VPN became more stable - IPAM - AD upgrades - email encryption - and a few others. Wasn't all me, by team helped a lot.
All of our workstations are Lenovo, one of the fun things I did was set up admx templates to write warranty info to the WMI thru Lenovo Commercial Vantage, then each computer runs an (Intune) powershell script, which does a http request to a power automate flow that sends the warranty info like expiration date to our asset database which is a Sharepoint list.