taylor@taypc6: ~

taylor@taypc6:~$ whoami

Taylor Chien

System Administration · Networking · Linux · Windows · Hardware

taylor@taypc6:~$ cat about.txt

Linux systems administrator with a background in networking, automation, and hardware. I keep high-availability infrastructure running at Clarkson University; before that I was a cyber engineer at CACI. I automate whatever I can, run a sprawling home lab alongside a 150+-core ARM/RISC-V/x86 testing cluster, and studied network and computer security at SUNY Poly — where I researched hypervisor performance and ARM datacenters.

taylor@taypc6:~$ ls -la ~/experience

Linux System Administrator — Clarkson University
Jan 2024 – Present · Potsdam, NY
  • Migrated the virtualization environment from VxRail to Proxmox
  • Maintain multiple high-availability, business-critical systems
  • Leading the migration to Rocky Linux 9
  • Manage and maintain the Puppet environment and codebase
  • Part of a 24/7 on-call rotation
Cyber Engineer T2 — CACI Inc.
Nov 2018 – Jul 2023 · Rome, NY
  • Built, secured, and automated in-house cloud environments for customers
  • Automated deployment and configuration of RHEL and Ubuntu guests — SaltStack, then Ansible
  • Managed segmented networks across Juniper, HPE, Force10, and Cisco switching
  • Stood up hypervisor clusters on ESXi and KVM
  • Worked in a small agile team and authored documentation to company standards

taylor@taypc6:~$ cat education.txt

B.S. in Network and Computer Security — SUNY Polytechnic Institute
Aug 2013 – May 2017 · Utica, NY
  • GPA 3.47 overall, 3.72 in major; minor in Computer Information Systems
  • Researched hypervisors, ARM devices, and Linux system benchmarks for capstone and independent study
  • Worked part-time for the Computer Science department on web and network study

taylor@taypc6:~$ cat skills.txt

Automation

AnsibleSaltStackPuppet TerraformDockerKubernetes

Operating Systems

DebianUbuntuRHEL / Rocky FreeBSDProxmoxESXi

Networking

CiscoHPE / ArubaJuniper Force10MikroTikCumulus

Storage & Hardware

ZFSTrueNASServers ARM SBCs

taylor@taypc6:~$ ls ~/projects

  • home-lab/ — Proxmox VE hypervisors running Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, and FreeBSD; TrueNAS Scale storage with geo-redundant backups. A permanent testbed for services.
  • arm-fleet/ — Mass-device testing cluster for automation at scale: 150+ CPU cores and 200 GB RAM across 100+ ARM, RISC-V, and x86 boards.

taylor@taypc6:~$ cat research.txt

A Comparison of Pre-Built Hypervisors
SUNY Poly · Independent Study · 2017

Benchmarked Proxmox VE, XenServer, Hyper-V, and VMware ESXi against a bare-metal baseline across 14 Dell servers. Proxmox came out ahead — top scores on over half the benchmarks, the most robust installer, and the richest feature set.

github.com/chientaylor/hypervisor-comparison-paper
Building an ARM-based Datacenter
SUNY Poly · Independent Study · 2017

Built a small datacenter from ~18 heterogeneous ARM single-board computers running LDAP, DNS, mail, and web apps, to see what enterprise services commodity ARM could deliver. Conclusion: the consumer ARM ecosystem was still too fractured to rely on — though a few boards (Odroid XU4, Udoo Quad) held up well throughout.

github.com/chientaylor/arm-datacenter-paper

taylor@taypc6:~$ ./contact.sh

taylor@taypc6:~$