Intro

I’m Chris Annable, a nerd.

Professionally, I work as a solutions architect for central IT at a higher ed institution in Ontario, Canada.

Hobby Projects

I tend to bounce between hobby projects. I’ll have a flurry of activity on a project, then shelf it for a random period of time. This is not an exhaustive list of stuff (these are the most fully-baked things); if you want that go here.

Project Description
docker-unifi The Unifi Network Controller app in a very simple container. Some day, I’ll fix the logging.
docker-metasploit Nightly MSF builds in a Kali container. I build this when I need it and, since they’re nightlies, constantly building it would be a waste of bandwidth. If you want to use it, you’ll be happier building it yourself.
docker-backup Alpine with tar. This exists as a simple implementation of Docker’s recommended backup strategy. I threw this at cron.
docker-sftp Proof of concept for on-the-fly chrooted SFTP servers in a container.
ssh-cm A simple SSH wrapper with a SQLite connection DB. I did this was a refresher on SQLite and actually use it a fair bit.
tclmpc Fully featured Tcl module for talking to MPD over a TCP socket.
tclmpc-cli A CLI tool to serve as a demo/showcase for tclmpc. Sorta mimics mpc in some extremely broad ways (it’s pretty different).

Experience/Interests

I tried to keep this short, but I tend to get drawn to complicated things… I like learning new stuff.

  • Automation
    • Ansible
    • PagerDuty Rundeck
    • DevOps, and topics around process automation and large system design are super cool
    • HashiStack - Consul, Vault, Terraform, Nomad
  • Containers
    • I make container images (see above) with a mixture of Docker and buildah
    • I tinker with container technologies all the time, and run some on my home network 24/7
  • Server virtualization
    • VMware Stack - ESXi, vSphere/vCenter (embedded PSC, ELM, cert management), vSphere Replication, Site Recovery
    • VxRail/vSAN
    • Citrix XenServer
    • XCP, XCP-NG (Vates, you are awesome)
    • QEMU/KVM - libvirt and not, system and user,
    • QEMU/Xen - a bit, prefer working with XAPI
    • Nutanix running ESXi, Hyper-V, and Acropolis
  • Enterprise storage - iSCSI SAN planning/deployment/management/monitoring/tuning. Specifically:
    • Dell Compellent (“SC Series”) - SC8000, SC7020, SC3020, SC2080.
    • Dell EqualLogic (“PS Series”) FW 6.x+ - PS6600 series, PS6200 series, PS6010 series (hybrid and not), PS4100 series
  • Operating Systems
    • I dig operating systems a lot. I like learning how they work under the hood.
    • Linux of many kinds, servers, desktops, on real iron, VMs, and Pis
      • Traditional distros - ex. Red Hat/DNF/Yum-based, Debian/Apt-based
      • Arch
      • Specialty distros - ex. VMware Photon, CoreOS, ThinStation
    • BSD - Mostly FreeBSD and NetBSD, but a bit of DragonflyBSD and OpenBSD
    • Solaris on Sparc (neat)
    • Windows client and server (for a while I was an endpoint admin, so did a lot of driver/deployment/sysprep kinds of stuff, and then there was VDI)
  • VDI
    • Citrix XenDesktop (5.x, 7.x), XenApp (6.x and 7.x+), with PVS, UPM, NetScaler Access Gateway, Web Interface, StoreFront
    • VMware View 5.x, ThinApp 5.x
  • Load Balancing/Reverse Proxies
    • KEMP LoadMaster (physical and virtual)
    • NetScaler MPX
    • Apache with mod_proxy, mod_jk
    • A bit of random things like nginx and WebLogic OHS+mod_sql
  • Networking
    • I’ve never been a network admin by trade, but really got into it in college and maintain an active interest in networking topics, ex. I’ve massively over-complicated my home network with subnetting (6 and 4) and VLANs, simply because I could.
    • I really like learning how network protocols work, and some places like TLS are intersections between networking and server/systems that I find nifty.
    • Ubiquiti EdgeMAX, routing, vlan-aware switching, firewalling, dual stack IPv4/6 networking (ULA and PD are cool)
    • Ubiquiti Unifi AC-LRs with the Unifi Network Controller app (see container above)
  • Programming
    • Similar to networking, I’ve never done this as a full-time gig, but was something I kept doing after high school and I maintain an active interest in it. Most of the stuff I do is scripting, some trivial, some complicated. It’s an itch I scratch every once and a while.
    • Tcl/Tk - CLI, GUI, socket-based networking
    • Powershell
    • VBS/VBA/VB (I don’t really miss this, though I did write an HTTP server in VB6 once)
    • ANSI C (in college mostly)
    • AWK (I keep meaning to dig into it more)
  • Software - This is where I decided to put oddball things
    • Vim, Neovim, vi, nvi
    • git
    • tmux (boy do I love tmux)
    • OpenvSwitch (with VMs and containers)
    • Sparx Enterprise Architect
    • Oracle DB - entitlement management and hosting environment design (VM guest, host, and storage config/tuning)
    • MySQL
    • XWiki
    • Atlassian products
  • Seriously random
    • HiFi audio
    • Multimedia streaming protocols and codec design
    • Factorio - seriously dangerous sometimes