Systems Administrator & Automation Engineer
Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
Summary
Systems Administrator at Timberlands Pacific in Launceston, with 25 years across systems administration, service delivery, and IT support. The work has run from hands-on infrastructure and virtualisation through to service-desk roles supporting users as varied as trauma counsellors and forestry scientists.
Day-to-day work spans:
Outside work, I am a core developer and moderator on late.sh, a live multi-user SSH platform. I contribute features to the platform itself, and I am the maker of Lateania, its persistent fantasy MUD, which I designed, built, and authored from scratch. I have also founded several international Discord communities totalling more than 80,000 members, among them Home.
Experience
One of four in the ICT team at a forestry company operating across Tasmania, South Australia, and Victoria, supporting 33 office staff and around 500 field contractors. Most users hold PhDs or masters degrees in forestry or data science, so the work that lands is usually a GIS pipeline, database connector, or application integration problem rather than a routine helpdesk ticket.
Delivered since joining
Standing environment
A contract taken after redundancy: IT infrastructure and support management while the Timberlands Pacific role came together.
Service desk analyst on the 1800RESPECT service delivery agreement under a new government-awarded contract. Joined in pre-production to onboard hundreds of specialist trauma counsellors against a four-week deadline, working closely with DVConnect, Save the Children Australia, and Marninwarntikura Women's Resource Centre throughout. Many of the counsellors were not technical, so support was kept patient and practical, aimed at getting them back to their callers quickly.
The role covered
Supported Bingo Australia's proprietary PlayMate bingo tablets and the Ubiquiti UniFi network and firewall infrastructure behind them. A family-run business, so the role had no fixed edges: highly technical work one day, hands-on operational work the next.
Technical
Operational
Ran an Airbnb from my own home in Katoomba, the highest-rated listing in the area. Earned Superhost status at the first eligible review cycle and held it continuously, which requires sustained 5-star ratings across every hospitality category, a near-perfect response rate, and effectively zero cancellations.
Client-facing and remote support covering 3,000+ users across Australasia, Singapore, and the Philippines, in a local team of three spanning three domains and a mixed Exchange, Domino, and SBS with Samba environment.
Support and configuration across
Key responsibilities
Before moving into IT, ran bars and clubs and worked venue doors, keeping troublemakers out and everyone else safe.
Core Skills
Selected Projects
All personally designed and built. Full source on GitHub.
A persistent fantasy MUD of over 8,500 rooms that I built from scratch, running as a door game inside late.sh: 17 classes, 100 character levels, a crafting economy from raw gathering to legendary gear, animal taming and rideable mounts, and a live rendered world map.
A sysadmin toolkit of 10 modules: Active Directory, Azure, live process and log monitoring in a btop-style dashboard, and HTML reporting. Cross-platform.
A local assistant that runs fully offline on Ollama: no API keys, no data leaving the machine. Cross-platform.
Palo Alto and FortiGate CLI generation in the browser: address objects, rules, IPsec, and troubleshooting output. Entirely client-side; nothing leaves the page.
A VLESS and Reality proxy deployment, plus a Cloudflare-tunnelled reverse HTTPS proxy for reaching home infrastructure from anywhere. Private, self-hosted, and censorship-resistant.
An interactive terminal game that teaches Linux and Bash across 8 levels: tar, grep, awk, sed, networking, and scripting, with lives, XP, and a leaderboard. Written in pure Bash.
A self-hosted media automation stack: Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, and Jellyseerr, containerised and reproducible.
A quick-reference study guide covering AZ-900 and AZ-801 topics: cloud concepts, networking, compute, storage, identity, and monitoring.
Community
One of several international Discord communities I have founded, together more than 80,000 members. Home is run on plain common sense rather than heavy moderation.
An SSH terminal clubhouse for developers: chat, lofi radio, and casual games, reachable with nothing but ssh late.sh. I contribute features across the platform, and Lateania, its flagship game, is entirely my own work: designed, built, and authored from scratch.
Ran a live streaming channel on Twitch and YouTube alongside full-time work, building and holding a regular audience.