About
Hi, I’m Matt Simmons
About me:
I’m a system administrator, and I specialize in small infrastructures. That includes, according to my own invented standards, networks with less than around 200 hosts. I’ve been a sysadmin since around 2002, when I became the Assistant Network Administrator of an ISP in West Virginia. I eventually became the primary administrator there, and later moved to Columbus, OH where I took my current role as system administrator of a small risk management firm. I relocated to North/Central New Jersey in the early part of 2009.
I’m also a writer (or at least I play one on TV). In addition to this blog, I have a semi-regular column called Confessions of a Sysadmin in the Simple Talk: Exchange magazine, and I’m currently working on the first of three books dedicated to Small Infrastructure Administration.
If you would like to contact me, feel free to drop me a line at standalone.sysadmin@gmail.com or @standaloneSA on twitter. Try to respond to all messages that I receive, so if you’re curious about something, or need some advice on an IT problem, feel free. I may not be able to offer a solution, but sometimes a different perspective is all you need.
About my infrastructure:
The infrastructure at my current position is the most advanced of anywhere I’ve worked, and I’ve worked hard to make it more enterprise-like. We have world-wide clients, so the service requires a very high uptime. Uptime requirements like this require a warm standby solution, so we’ve co-located in two geographically diverse locations. Our data is valuable, so our backup solution must be reliable. We’ve got a pretty robust setup, and I’m very happy to work here. There’s no shortage of things to learn and there’s no time I can picture having nothing to improve upon.
About the blog:
I started this blog in May of 2008. Originally, I had a Live Journal account to which I posted everything. Most of my LJ friends were not technical in nature, and didn’t get much from my entries. That prompted me to create this blog. Since I have not, until recently, had another administrator with which to share the load, I decided to call it “Standalone Sysadmin”. It seems the name has struck a chord with a lot of other people in the same position.
In terms of readership, it looks like there are around 1,500 people subscribed to my feedburner RSS feeds. I’m also aggregated in several forms to various SysAdmin lists. I’m always looking for more readers, and I’m always looking for feedback about what they want to see. If you’ve got a question or comment, please drop me a line and let me know.
Email me
content rss