Linux System Administrator

JERRY STAFFORT FOLLOT

Laurel, MD • 240-***-**** • ********@*****.***

U.S. Citizen • Active Public Trust • DoD 8570 IAT Level II - Security+ CE PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Senior Linux and Windows systems administrator with 20 years of enterprise infrastructure experience, including 5 years supporting DoD and federal 24/7/365 production environments. Tier 2/3 administrator across RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Windows Server within VMware vSphere virtual environments spanning multiple enclaves. Deep background in enterprise patch management (Red Hat Satellite, Foreman, Ansible, BigFix), centralized log analysis and trend identification (Splunk, ELK, Zabbix), configuration management (Ansible, Puppet, Chef), and automation via Bash, Python, and PowerShell. Proven at triaging and classifying incidents in ITSM ticketing workflows, distinguishing isolated user faults from enterprise-wide outages, and delivering root cause analysis that prevents recurrence. Strong written and verbal communicator with a record of documenting procedures for 24/7 Operations Watch personnel and mentoring peers. CLEARANCE & CERTIFICATIONS

Clearance: Active Public Trust

Citizenship: United States Citizen

IAT Level II: CompTIA Security+ CE

Additional: VMware VCA/VCP, Red Hat RHCSA/RHCE, CompTIA Linux+, Microsoft MCSA, ITIL v4 Foundation, AWS Solutions Architect, AWS DevOps

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Operating Systems: RHEL 5/6/7/8/9, CentOS, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, Oracle Linux, Solaris; Windows Server 2012 R2 / 2016 / 2019; macOS client support

Virtualization & HCI: VMware vSphere / ESXi / vCenter, VMware Horizon virtual desktops, KVM, LXD, MAAS, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (Dell VxRail concepts)

Cloud: AWS (EC2, S3, EBS, ELB, VPC, Route 53, RDS, Auto Scaling, IAM), Microsoft Azure, GCP Patch & Lifecycle Mgmt: Red Hat Satellite, Foreman / Katello, Ansible, BigFix, WSUS, YUM/DNF, RPM, Kickstart, PXE boot Configuration Mgmt & IaC: Ansible (playbooks, roles, AWX), Puppet, Chef, Terraform Monitoring & Logging: Splunk Enterprise (data onboarding, SPL, dashboards, alerting, forwarder management), Zabbix, Nagios, Sensu Go, Prometheus, ELK Stack, SolarWinds, Observium, Cacti CI/CD & Version Control: GitLab / GitLab CI, Jenkins, Git, Bitbucket, Bamboo, Ant, Docker, Kubernetes Scripting & Automation: Bash / Shell, Python, PowerShell, PowerCLI, Groovy, YAML, JSON Security & Compliance: DISA STIG, CIS Benchmarks, NIST 800-53, Nessus / ACAS scanning and remediation, SELinux, iptables / firewalld, ACLs, IPsec & AnyConnect VPN, Cisco ASA, audit logging, access control ITSM & Collaboration: ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, Jira Service Management, Atlassian Suite (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Crowd, Bamboo) Services & Middleware: Apache HTTPD, Tomcat, JBoss, WildFly, NGINX, DNS/BIND, DHCP, NFS, Samba, LDAP, LVM, ZFS, RAID, Lustre, NetBackup

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Senior Linux Systems Administrator 03/2023 – Present National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bethesda, MD (Remote)

Administer and optimize 500+ RHEL, CentOS, and Ubuntu servers across on-premises VMware vSphere clusters and hybrid AWS environments, serving as Tier 2/3 escalation point for enterprise-wide infrastructure incidents.

Own enterprise patch management for the Linux estate using Red Hat Satellite and Foreman/Katello, building content views, lifecycle environments, and errata schedules that keep 350+ systems inside monthly compliance windows with zero unplanned outages attributable to patching.

Engineer and maintain Splunk Enterprise: onboard data from 500+ hosts, tune forwarders and index-time parsing, author SPL queries, and build dashboards and correlation alerts used by operations and security teams for real-time incident response and audit reporting.

Perform log review and incident trend analysis in Splunk to distinguish isolated user issues from enterprise-wide degradation, converting recurring alert patterns into permanent fixes rather than repeat tickets.

Deploy and maintain Zabbix monitoring for host availability, service uptime, and resource thresholds; supplement with custom Sensu Go checks and handlers integrated into Slack and PagerDuty for on-call escalation.

Manage configuration state across the fleet with Ansible and Puppet, standardizing builds, enforcing STIG and CIS hardening baselines, and eliminating configuration drift across environments.

Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines in GitLab CI and Jenkins, integrating with Git, Bitbucket, and Bamboo to automate build, test, and deployment of infrastructure code and application releases.

Automate provisioning with Terraform and Ansible, cutting environment deployment time by 60% and making rebuilds repeatable and auditable.

Provide on-call support in a 24/7/365 rotation, leading outage response after hours and delivering written root cause analysis reports covering technical findings, resolution steps, and preventive recommendations.

Author and maintain operations and monitoring runbooks used by Operations Watch personnel, reducing escalations to engineering for routine conditions.

Administer the Atlassian Suite (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Crowd, Bamboo) including workflows, custom fields, permissions, automation rules, and plugin development.

Containerize legacy applications with Docker and orchestrate with Kubernetes; support migration of on-premises services to AWS. Linux Systems Administrator 01/2019 – 03/2023

Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) Washington, DC

Provided Tier 2 administration and 24/7 production support for a mixed Linux and Windows Server estate, handling escalated incidents through the enterprise ticketing system and coordinating with customers and stakeholders to scope, analyze, and resolve requirements.

Built and maintained servers on VMware, KVM, LXD, and MAAS, standardizing bare-metal and virtual provisioning with Kickstart and PXE boot across Dell, AIC, ASUS, and Gigabyte hardware.

Executed a disciplined patch management program scheduled monthly security updates plus out-of-band emergency patching for actively exploited vulnerabilities while limiting update scope on embedded and fragile systems to protect uptime.

Hardened RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux, and Ubuntu builds to agency security policy; remediated Nessus findings and validated fixes against STIG and CIS baselines.

Operated a layered monitoring stack of Zabbix, Nagios, Prometheus, and Cockpit, with Wireshark, tcpdump, and nmap for deep packet and network fault isolation.

Deployed Cisco ASA firewalls, configured ACLs to restrict internal network access, and stood up IPsec and AnyConnect VPN tunnels to segment traffic.

Managed configuration with Puppet and Ansible and migrated build and deploy automation from Jenkins jobs into GitLab CI pipelines for versioned, reviewable delivery.

Administered an HPC environment with RAID, ZFS, and Lustre, troubleshooting with zpool, lctl, and lfs.

Wrote Python scripts and YAML templates to deploy application workloads to Kubernetes clusters and Linux/Windows/database targets in cloud and on-premises environments.

Restricted DHCP activity by registering MAC addresses to the DHCP server, and enforced HTTP auth and ACLs on sensitive web content and across VLAN boundaries.

Tuned kernel parameters with sysctl and diagnosed process and resource contention with top, htop, and ps; ran Linux and Cisco CLI diagnostics to isolate network faults.

Linux Systems Administrator 01/2017 – 01/2019

SAP NS2 Herndon, VA

Supported cloud-hosted business-critical solutions, provisioning highly available AWS EC2 instances with LAMP stacks and designing solutions across EC2, S3, EBS, ELB, Auto Scaling groups, and VPC.

Automated deployment with Chef, Jenkins, Git, and Ant scripts, delivering a continuous delivery model that reduced manual release effort and human error.

Built out DEV, test, production, and disaster recovery data center environments, including migration and configuration of DR failover targets.

Installed RHEL from scratch using Kickstart and PXE boot; tuned kernel parameters against workload profile and system capability.

Remediated OS-level security vulnerabilities against organizational policy and configured infrastructure to standard security benchmarks.

Installed and maintained Apache Tomcat and MySQL servers; performed installation, configuration, tuning, backup, recovery, and upgrades across Windows and Linux platforms.

Wrote custom monitoring checks and integrated them into deployment pipelines to build self-healing remediation for known failure modes.

Coordinated between network, enterprise application, and development architecture teams; evaluated emerging tooling and introduced it to accelerate the organization's move to agile delivery. Linux Systems Administrator 11/2014 – 12/2016

University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) Adelphi, MD

Installed VMware ESX and built virtual machines from scratch; created blade profiles from templates within defined SLA targets.

Patched Linux and Windows instances inside scheduled maintenance windows using Ansible, remediating system vulnerabilities on a repeatable cycle.

Managed AWS footprint including Route 53 DNS records, S3 buckets, and VPC design with public and private subnets, NAT instances, and Elastic Load Balancers.

Integrated administration work across ITIL service domains Change, Problem, and Configuration Management ensuring changes were documented, reviewed, and traceable.

Responded to security incidents including malware, DDoS, and suspected data exposure, participating in containment and post-incident review.

Maintained Kickstart configuration for Linux production and test system builds; provided remote support to field engineers.

Performed weekly run-level verification to confirm high availability of database and application services.

Automated build and deploy scripts for Jenkins/Hudson and performed LAMP installation and configuration on RHEL, Ubuntu, and Amazon Linux.

Linux Systems Administrator 09/2011 – 11/2014

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Silver Spring, MD

Provided systems administration in a demanding 24/7 production environment, monitoring CPU, memory, and disk utilization and performing proactive capacity analysis to head off resource exhaustion.

Installed, upgraded, and configured Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x using Kickstart servers and interactive installation.

Managed Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP, and troubleshot outages spanning directory, name resolution, and address assignment.

Created and managed user accounts, permissions, disk quotas, and process monitoring across Solaris, CentOS, and RHEL.

Used BMC Remedy to process data center service requests including IP allocation, ILO provisioning, and DNS changes building the ticket-driven discipline applied later in ServiceNow-equivalent workflows.

Created Linux virtual machines through VMware vCenter; managed packages via RPM and YUM.

Configured DNS, NFS, FTP, and remote access services, and installed and supported Apache on production Linux servers.

Performed backup and restore operations with NetBackup; coordinated across database, storage, network, and systems management teams.

NOC Analyst 04/2008 – 09/2011

U.S. Air Force Reston, VA

Monitored enterprise infrastructure from a Network Operations Center in a 24x7 DoD environment, triaging alerts, classifying incident severity, and escalating to appropriate tiers within response-time requirements.

Performed installation, configuration, and upgrade of RHEL 5.x and 6.x, including builds from scratch via Kickstart.

Administered Linux servers day-to-day: user and group provisioning, permission structures, filesystem configuration, and package deployment to client specification.

Configured iptables rule chains to add, append, delete, and replace firewall policy, and participated in security hardening across the UNIX server estate.

Troubleshot application faults on Apache web servers and database servers running Red Hat Linux, working issues through to resolution during production hours.

Executed backup and restore procedures with tar and gzip, including disk partitioning and formatting; maintained documented recovery procedures for reference by follow-on shifts.

Created RAID volumes using hardware RAID controllers and LSI hardware; performed daily LVM operations.

Built Linux virtual machines through VMware Virtual Center and installed and configured vsftpd FTP services. IT Support Technician 07/2006 – 04/2008

Mid Continent University Mayfield, KY

Delivered desktop and server support to faculty, staff, and students, handling intake, diagnosis, and resolution of hardware, software, and connectivity issues.

Installed, configured, and upgraded RHEL 5.x and 6.x systems and handled daily Linux administration tasks.

Created and maintained user and group accounts and permission sets on Linux servers.

Supported a 24x7 production environment and troubleshot application issues on Apache web and database servers. EDUCATION

Bachelor of Science, Business Management 05/2010

Mid Continent University Mayfield, KY

REFERENCES

Available upon request.

Contact this candidate