Staff Nate Allen

Well-rounded sysadmin with diverse experience seeking to apply his skills for a position in IT, Cybersecurity, or Application development.

Time at Systems Group

Est. 10/2021 - Present

Projects & Accomplishments

Software Engineering

• Developed Django web applications for the ODU Computer Science Department.

1. Lobby Display: Hosted on a touchscreen display at two locations in ODU, this application displays a visual directory for ODU’s CS Department. Professors login via LDAP to the portal and customize their profiles. link title

2. Consultant Scheduler: A system to keep track of coworkers' scheduled work hours. Consultants enter their class hours and choose their preferred work schedule. The system cross-checks the class schedule and ensures a minimum number of consultants are on schedule at once. Bootstrap5 frontend.

3. Uptime Monitor: Currently working on a system to monitor the status of core services and certificates and CS Dept. services utilizing an ELK stack to aggregate and sort data, then display uptime status on a designated page.

IT

• Implemented an ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana cluster) to monitor the uptime of 300+ clients in 4 different computer labs and utilized Metricbeat and Heartbeat data shippers.
• Practiced customer service using a ticketing system to troubleshoot issues.
• Administer and troubleshot 1000+ client Windows and Unix Environment
• Completed learning projects in Linux/Windows servers, highly-available hosting, networking, and Django web app development.

RESEARCH

• Is it safer at the beach? Spatial and temporal analyses... Coded a Python script to periodically scrape video and save frames from a live webcam stream of a beach. The pictures and video were then analyzed using GIS software and open-source tools to measure the level of social distancing.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2021.105533 Code: GitHub Repo

Education

1. BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN CYBERSECURITY, OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY, NORFOLK, 08/2021 – PRESENT, Anticipated Graduation Date: 12/2023 GPA: 3.65; Related Studies: Unix for Programmers; Object Oriented Programming/Design; Music Recording.

2. ASSOCIATE OF SCIENCE: COMPUTER SCIENCE, TIDEWATER COMMUNITY COLLEGE, NORFOLK, GRADUATED MAY 2021 GPA: 4.0; Summa Cum Laude; President’s Honor Role; Phi Theta Kappa; Related Studies; Calculus; Data Structures and Algorithms.

3. HS DIPLOMA, NEW SUMMIT ACADEMY, COSTA RICA, GRADUATED 2014 GPA: 3.75; Graduated from a study abroad program in CR, where I lived for a year and was exposed to the culture.

Skill Profile

• Linux environments (Ubuntu Server, Debian, Kali Linux, *nix): Knowledgeable in package management, user/group management, building from source, IPTables firewall, NFS, job schedulers & systemd unit files, bash scripting, web hosting & highly-available hosting, SSH Keys and SSL Encryption, and regular expressions.

• Programming Languages: Advanced Python 3 and C++, YAML, Experience with HTML, Jinja2 Templating, and ORMs. Basic experience with SQL, JavaScript.

• Databases: MySQL, SQLite.

• DevOps: Docker containers, Docker-Compose, CI/CD Pipelines with Gitlab and Gitlab-Runner

• Windows/Windows Server 2016-2019: Experience in administering a Domain Controller with Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and PowerShell. Package management with Chocolatey. Experience adding LDAP login capability to web apps

• Automation: Experience in orchestration and automating tasks using Ansible. Continuous deployment of websites using CI/CD pipelines and shell scripts over SSH.

• Virtualization: Extensive experience with virtualization software such as oVirt engine, VirtualBox, and VMWare.

• Research: Experience in web scraping, formatting, and filtering data using Python.

• Networking: Knowledge of DNS, IP addressing, ports, routing/switching, VLANs, HTTP, OSI & TCP/IP models, experience troubleshooting network issues with CLI programs.

• Monitoring:

* ELK Stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana for uptime monitoring systems.
* Data Shippers: MQTT protocol, Heartbeat, Metricbeat, Filebeat 
* Thingsboard IoT Dashboard

• Version Control: Gitlab and GitHub.

• IDE/Text Editors: Prefer Visual Studio for C++ and VS Code for Python and Linux remote development.

References

1. GEORGE MCLEOD Director of Geospatial & Vis Systems Old Dominion University Information Technology Services gmcleod@odu.edu 757-683-6752

2. AL DURSO Owner, A & B Marine 757-582-4406

3. CHRISTOPHER ZAJCHOWSKI, PhD Assistant Professor, Department of Human Movement Sciences Old Dominion University 757-683-5078 czajchow@odu.edu

4. RAHUL MALIK Systems Engineer III, Old Dominion University Computer Science Department’s Systems Group 757-639-5304 malik@cs.odu.edu

5. ISAAC HAGY Systems Engineer I, Old Dominion University Computer Science Department’s Systems Group 804-876-2868