Kurt Schwanke

Background

About Kurt Schwanke

I have worked with a variety of companies from law firms to credit unions to car dealerships when working at an MSP. I have seen a variety of technologies and due to this, am able to quickly pick up any technology I may not be familiar with. Technologies I work with include VMware, Linux (Ubuntu/CentOS), storage (Ceph, ZFS based on FreeBSD and MDRAID on CentOS) and Fortinet Firewalls. I use solutions such as Kickstart/PXE and Terraform, Ansible and Git to perform most server deployments and configurations. The servers managed will deploy technologies such as Apache/Nginx, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, DNS, DHCP, TFTP, FTP, etc. I heavily utilize containers using Docker or Kubernetes to provide various services such as an Ookla Speedtest server. I work with monitoring solutions to ensure all services are properly monitored and alerted on. We have deployed Zabbix and Grafana to provide the monitoring, alerting, and graphing required to ensure all services stay operational and to provide visibility into our environment. Outside of this, I also work with enhancing our network security by creating and pushing out policies. I also changed the structure of the internal corporate network to provide network segmentation. Using a combination of delegated AD permissions, GPO and Firewall policies and the network segmentation, we successfully prevented an externally run penetration test from achieving domain admin (or any admin) privilege escalation. We were 1 of approximately 7 customers to achieve this in as many years. With the passion I have for technology I also run a home lab that allows me to play with and deploy new technologies as they arise in the industry. In many cases, solutions I have deployed at home I then bring to the office. Examples of this would be Ansible, Nginx reverse proxies, Git servers and Zabbix.