Marktoso - IT by Mark D

Who Are You?

Mark Diaz

Hi, I’m Mark, a 12-year IT veteran, and first-generation American, with a B.S. and an M.S. in Information Technology. I was interested in technology from an early age and began learning about how computers worked by breaking my own. Playing games was a huge motivator and I would spend the time reinstalling Windows to be able to play Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis before bedtime.

What do you do?

I wear many hats and have varied experience in the field:

  • Management
    • Leading teams of 5 to 10 people
      • Hiring process
    • Sink for customer escalations
    • Working closely with other infrastructure teams in their technical space
    • Coordinating assets for physical deployment
    • Active Directory migration
    • Leading projects affecting thousands of personnel
    • Technical liason with vendors
    • Production of technical documentation for peers as well as customer-facing documentation
  • Cloud Administration - Azure
    • Deployment and management of IaaS
      • Terraform
    • Deployment and management of SaaS
      • CosmosDB
      • Application Gateways
    • Monitoring and Alerting
    • SSO, MFA, CA, and SCIM
    • Entra ID
  • M365 Administration
    • Exchange Online
    • SharePoint and OneDrive
    • Purview
    • Defender for M365
  • Active Directory Administration
    • Group Policy
    • Organizational design
    • Automation of group memberships
  • System Center/Microsoft Endpoint Manager
    • Lead Configuration Manager administrator
    • Fleet management
      • Operating system deployment
      • Reporting
      • Compliance baselines and associated items
      • Incident response
    • Modern Device Management
      • Intune enrollment and configuration
        • Autopilot deployment
        • Windows Update for Business
      • Defender ATP configuration
    • WSUS administration and update deployment
      • Performing upgrades to Configuration Manager
      • Reporting and metrics
      • Windows 10 servicing
      • Office 365 servicing
    • Orchestrator
      • Updating user accounts and group memberships periodically
  • Jamf Pro
    • Lead Jamf administrator
    • DEP and Apple School Manager integration
      • iOS prestage enrollments
      • macOS prestage enrollments
    • Setup and upgrading Jamf Pro on-premises
    • NomAD deployment
    • Deployment of App Store apps for iOS and macOS as well as traditional macOS apps
    • Assigning attributes to users using the Jamf API and Active Directory as information source
  • Code42 Incydr
    • Installation and administration of on-premises Code42 Enterprise environment
      • Automation of user creation and organization assignment via Code42 Enterprise API using Active Directory as information source
    • Migration of on-prem environment to Code42 Incydr cloud authority
      • Configuration of SCIM groups in AzureAD to automate user creation and organization assignment
    • Creation of deployment profiles as well as additional tooling necessary for per-user deployment using Configuration Manager
  • Service Now
    • Service Now administrator
    • Integrator with Active Directory, M365, and other products
    • Design low-code solutions

I’ve never really thought much of it but, looking back, that’s a wide and varied experience set. And that’s just what I’ve done professionally. I have experience in GCP as well as AWS. In Azure I’ve played with the Cognitive Services and they are truly fascinating to me. I’ve been working with machine learning for personal projects. In addition to, or in concert with, Google Colab for machine learning I’ve also leveraged Google App Scripts for integration of the generated and analyzed material, as well as external APIs, into documentation meant for collaboration in production environments. I’ve administrated various flavors of Linux systems at different stages of the operating system’s maturity–right now I think the most current VM I have is an Ubuntu 18.04 Server installation running MongoDB with an import of the IMDb datasets. I’m also experienced in audio production and have more than a passing interest in photography (originally black and white and expanding to medium format color negative, color slide, and ultimately digital) as well as film and video production.

What are you in to?

Those are all the things that I do. As far as things that I like, well I like movies quite a bit. I also listen to a lot of music and podcasts. At the moment, that’s mostly going to be in the post-rock genre and the improv genre, respectively, although that is always subject to change. I will regularly take a few weeks off of all of that to just read a few books.

I am a Miami Heat and Miami Marlins fan. I grew up playing baseball and basketball in South Florida. I also enjoy motorsport–in particular within the the NHRA and Formula 1 organizations. I don’t follow sports as much as I’d like because I’m happily married with two wonderful kids that occupy a lot of my time. As such I don’t get into multiplayer gaming any more and have gravitated more towards single-player narrative and puzzle games which are much less sensitive to the schedule of a parent of young children.

My partner and I have brewed a few beers although we haven’t done so in a few years. We’ve been looking to go electric and we’ve heard a lot of people really enjoying the 1gal process for its simplicity compared to the traditional 7.5gal that we’ve previously undertaken. A couple of those beers ended up good enough that I wouldn’t have felt bad about paying for them. From what I’ve kept track of, I’ve tried over 1200 unique beers. I can’t decide if I like Greek, Italian, or Latin American food the best but I won’t pass up a good burger or chili dog.

What stuff do you have?

Most of the work here will be tied in to my homelab. I put most of this together several years ago so it’s not terribly powerful but it is decently manageable in a normal home. The centerpiece is an AMD FX-8350 with 32GB of RAM on an Asus board running Windows Hyper V Server 2019. The VMs on that box live on a 2TB Crucial SSD. I also have a TrueNAS box with an FX-8320 and 32GB of ECC RAM. It’s an 8x2TB SAS spinners in RAID-Z2 and in a Silverstone CS380 and it is both louder and hotter than I would prefer. With drive densities as they are, right now, I could replace the 8 drives with 4 and still gain a substantial amount of storage space. My previous desktop, an i7-4770k on an ASRock board, now runs Proxmox. I may shake that up soon enough. Interconnecting all of this is a few Mikrotik products as well as some older Cisco switches.

The technology purchase I’ve been most excited about in the past several years is the M1 MacBook Air on which I’m typing this. The power versus portability is extremely good and has made me reconsider how I work. I was big on having a full tower case and all that yadda yadda–and I still do–but in my life I find myself less and less in that room of the house and more commonly immersed in the day-to-day of family life. This device enables me to do that without having to sacrifice the desktop experience and I appreciate that.