I'm a server and infrastructure guy with a penchant for the big picture and a lifelong love of technology.

I'm not looking for new opportunities at this time.

Ask me about my homelab, and ignore the huge backlog of projects. I've redone my home networks for the end of my Meraki licenses, then switched back. I've worked in networking and storage although it's been a little while. I have never been a developer. I've never waited tables (even database tables) but respect those who do. I admit what I don't know and learn quickly. 

Today I'm an engineering product manager for UCS networking in the compute business at Cisco. 

From 2022-2023 I was product line manager for software management products at Supermicro. 

From 2018-2020 I focused on channel partner enablement, partner sales engineering, solutions engineering at Cisco. 

From 2014-2018 I played storyteller/matchmaker between big data ISVs, Cisco channel partners and internal sales teams, and occasionally a customer or 100. I've been doing big data since late 2003/early 2004 (really) and Hadoop since probably 2008 (CDH1). I presented at partner events and public conferences including Strata+Hadoop World (2x) and Cisco Live (4x, Distinguished Speaker). 

On the first day at Cisco (right after lunch), I pushed a half million dollar deal over the edge with my personal experience outweighing a competitor's positioning. From then on, I brought context and proportion to challenging situations, helping our customers succeed and our sales teams make money. I believe those two should not be mutually exclusive, and I consider it my mission to bring them together wherever I work. 

Before Cisco, I was a senior level Silicon Valley systems operations professional with nearly 20 years (different years, even) of production UNIX system administration in multiple varieties of UNIX (Solaris, Linux, BSD) as well as experience in other desktop and server platforms. I built a proven history of delivering enterprise class scalable server, network, and DR/BC environments within stringent budget and time restraints.

I blog at rsts11.com and rsts11travel.com. 

Specialties: Big data platforms, hardware, and education; system administration, hardware planning and management (even clouds need hardware), Hadoop, written English (documentation is our friend), UNIX-based email systems, coffee preparation & procurement, operations team building and sustaining. 

I'm not a developer or coder although I can read or tweak some code. I don't have an MBA or a PhD. 

I'm not looking for new opportunities at this time.

Robert Novak

I just posted a cluster deployment walk-through on the Cisco Community site, rolling out Proxmox VE 9.1 from Proxmox Server Solutions on the Cisco UCS X210c M7 modular servers. 

It was a fun and productive effort, having not touched Intersight for the larger part of the last decade. Next up in the time machine recovery, I'll be writing up Ceph deployment on VE 9.1 after about 13 years away from Ceph (I last used it on Cisco UCS C220 M3S at Disney Interactive in 2013 or so, trying to deal with Tanenbaum's Law and a datacenter migration). 

Are you running Proxmox VE on Cisco UCS? Tell me what's going on in the comments.

🚝Robert Novak

Open article: Proxmox Virtual Environment for Cisco UCS Servers by community.cisco.com

Proxmox Virtual Environment for Cisco UCS Servers

So last month I learned that my Lenovo Thinkstation P360 won't drive an eGPU on the TB4 ports. 

Last night I learned that my Intel NUC10i7FNH1 won't drive an eGPU on the TB3 ports, or when it does, it interferes with the NVMe drive (and possibly SATA, although that might have just been an 8 year old 60GB SSD finally dying). 

Apple Silicon Macs don't seem to care for NVIDIA GPUs, from what I read, so I haven't even tried that. 

But my Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen 2 (nice little Xeon laptop) seemed okay with the eGPU. 

I'm so tired.

Who wouldn't want to go through a new account process for every application in the same platform, manually entering your resume after uploading it, realizing no human will ever look at more than 5 words of it? 

Been there, done that.

Paddy Jobsman | Helping creators + brands grow with memes & creative content | 1M+ social media followers across two brands

>saw the perfect job to apply for
>workday application

Hobby Shop

Dedicated to embedded system development.

Retiree at large

Theatro

I'll be building automated regression testing for their devices. More later...

Senior Automation Manager

Dell EMC

We're now Dell-EMC. Currently I'm working on Symphony, our new Vcesystems management application.

Principal QA Engineer

MART Pro-Service Solutions

We provide QA/test services to companies wanting to outsource or augment their resources. I develop software, test solutions and provide project management for our clients. Co-developed a log capture tool for use in distributed environments.

VP of Engineering

Cisco Systems

Designed, implemented, and maintained software tools used by a large system test group. This included tools to manage test documentation, test data, test environments, and automate troubleshooting for test engineers. Mentored summer interns and helped them develop Flex on Rails internal web application.

Senior QA/Test Automation Engineer

UltimateMatch

Contract QA/test work for online dating service. Designed and executed system tests for web application.

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Yonaguska Services

Managed crew that provided cleaning services to businesses around the Texas hill country.

Owner

Solomio

Developed tests and test automation for SMS application.

Senior QA/Test Engineer

Agilent Technologies

Contract engineer in QA/test organization. Designed and executed system tests.

Sun Microsystems

Managed QA for the Sun.com portal. Developed test documentation and processes and integrated them with development processes. Managed Sun's test tool contract. Mentored interns.

Software QA/Test Manager

Developed Sun's computer telephony integration (CTI) architecture for its call centers and implemented deployment lab.

Performance and behavioral research for consolidated serve project. Implemented lab and managed senior system administrators. Developed test strategies and managed execution of the studies.

Deployment of Javastation network computer. Implemented deployment architecture and managed lab and senior system administrators. Mentored summer interns.

Senior Software Engineer

I am an seasoned engineer with a breadth of experience developing automated systems, tools, infrastructure monitors and process automation. I am an experienced manager, researcher, engineer and technician and always up for a challenge.

Specialties: System engineering, development, automation, telecom, data communications

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