Seth Hall – IT Professional | Systems Administrator

About Me

Hello!
Thank you for visiting my site. If you're here then chances are I've sent you a resume or you may have stumbled across a post from me on a forum and checking my site out. I’m 32 year old IT professional with ~10 years of professional IT experience dealing with basic desktop support/troubleshooting to more complex server related issues and some development work. I fell in love with computers when I was a Freshman in High School and knew that IT was where I wanted to be. I was always finding a way to get out of my classes to go to the computer lab because I was working on building something with VB6 and then VB.NET or helping out other students with things they were working on in class. I would sometimes bring my Windows ME machine from home to wipe and reinstall everything needed on our school’s T1 line instead of using my 56k dial-up connection.

After graduating High School in 2007, I did small projects around the community I grew up in and did some freelance work too. My first “real” IT job was a work from home tech support job answering in-bound calls from several different branded companies working on a variety of customer issues including personal machines, printers, and servers. I worked at this before finding a position in Bentonville, AR working for NCR supporting the Wal*Mart environments. I started as a POS Register Technician taking calls from stores and supporting all their registers throughout the store. I was with NCR for almost 3 years and in that time, I supported the POS, Self-Checkout and ATM, and the back-office equipment. When I left NCR, I was working on starting my own business doing support for customers through OnForce as well as development work on Elance and oDesk. I did this for a year before finding a position with Kelly Services working for Apple supporting iOS devices. While working with Kelly Services/Apple, I was supporting anything running iOS and associated hardware/services. When I took this position, I had never used an iPhone, iPad, Mac, iTunes, etc. I was able to quickly learn the product and systems in the environment so worked in a Tier 1 and Tier 2 role very quickly.

I was working for Kelly Services/Apple for about 6 months when I started looking for a more technical role in a space I wanted to be in. I stumbled across Intermedia Cloud Communications in 2013 and they were starting a work-from-home program so quickly jumped at the opportunity. I have been with them almost 8 years and enjoyed every minute of it. When I came on with Intermedia, I was excited to be going into a more technical roles supporting Hosted Exchange and things like Outlook, ActiveSync, Lync/Skype for Business, and SharePoint so always put my best foot forward since we were also customer support. While with Intermedia, I had moved from our Tier 1 level to our Onboarding and now to where I am with our Tier 2 team. I’m working on and troubleshooting more complex customer issues and questions as related to our services mentioned above as well as Microsoft 365 which is where my current interest is. As I have learned more about Microsoft 365 and Azure Cloud offerings, it is where I want to head in my career which is one reason why I started this site as mentioned on my Home page.

Most of my time now is spent working or studying certification related material (currently prepping for AWS Cloud Practitioner) but I also enjoy spending time looking into more areas that I have interest in but no exposure. This includes Azure, Virtualization (Hyper-V), Cloud, and Security. When I’m not doing any of the above then I’m spending time with my girlfriend, kids, and our dog. I enjoy fishing, camping, road trips, wood working, pyrography, and my favorite hobby BBQ (follow my instagram @bighallbbq).

-Seth

Professional Experience

2013 - Present

Systems Administrator

Intermedia Cloud Communications

This positions supports our BizApps offering Hosted Exchange, Skype for Business, Sharepoint, File Sharing, Microsoft 365 and associated services to our customers. I act as an escalation point for our Advisor and Specialist support levels and take on more complex issues and troubleshooting dealing with connectivity issues, 3rd party services integration, archiving/compliance, and more. My day can vary dealing with DNS, mail flow issues, message tracing, Outlook or client connectivity, DLP, MFA, Conditional Access issues, and more.

Work closely with our System Admin and Development teams to help identify bugs and customer impacting trends.
Take on more complex escalations from Management team dealing with frustrated customers and/or issues needing in-depth troubleshooting.
Started as Tier 1, promoted to Onboarding Implementation team for Small Business customers going through migrations, to my current Tier 2 position.

November 2012 - November 2013

iOS Senior Technical Advisor

Kelly Services/Apple Inc

I was part of the Apple@Home Work-From-Home program where I offered consumer support for iPhones, iPads, iCloud, iTunes, and some Mac issues. My day to day in my Tier 1 role was to assist customers with setting up their device, troubleshoot issues and try to upsell AppleCare where applicable. After being promoted to the Tier 2 department, I handled more complex issues and also aided in capturing bugs and devices that seen issues after updates were rolled out to assist Apple Engineering in resolving those.

First remote job so had to be a self-starter and had never used an iOS product so went in with zero knowledge of the products I was supporting.
Promoted from Tier 1 to Tier 2 within 3 months
Quick decision-making skills to help frustrated customers and being able to approve support if they were outside their warranty period.

September 2008 - April 2011

Tier 2 Advanced Helpdesk Analyst

NCR Corporation

In this role, I offered support on the Wal*Mart contract supporting POS registers and associated equipment in all US and UK stores. I took inbound calls from store employees with down registers and assisted with troubleshooting, determining what was needed and dispatching our Customer Engineers with replacement parts I was soon promoted to our Self-Checkout and MCX (ATM) team until finally reaching our Advanced Helpdesk team where we supported the back-office equipment, switches, and assisted the Wal*Mart Home Office in performing basic network tasks to bring equipment up and/or dispatch Customer Engineers with equipment vital for stores to process transactions.

Maintained high remote resolve rates on all teams.
Performed some minor automation with pulling data from Remedy ticketing system then pinging downed machines referenced in the ticket to close out tickets for machines that were now up.
Developed a program to assist with making sure that agents were notified they were due for lunch to be sure we maintained phone coverage.

Knowledge/Skills

Windows Server 2012-2019

Microsoft Office Suite

Exchange Server 2007-2019

Lync 2010 - Skype for Business

Spam/Email Filtering

Microsoft 365

Enterprise Mobility + Security

Endpoint Manager

Microsoft Teams

eDiscovery/Archiving/Compliance

DNS

PowerShell

Azure

Active Directory (AD DS and AAD)

Linux (Ubuntu and CentOS)

AWS

Certifications

M365: Enterprise Administrator Expert (2021 - 2023)
M365: Messaging Administrator Asociate (2020 - 2022)
MCSE: Productivity (Exchange 2013)
MCSA: Windows Server 2012
CompTIA Security+ (Expired)
CompTIA Network+ (Expired)
CompTIA A+ (Expired)

Interests

Cloud Computing - AWS and Azure
Security
Virtualization - VMware and Hyper-V
Development - PowerShell and Python
Linux

Current Projects

Prepping for AWS Cloud Practitioner
I have passed the Messaging Administrator Associate (MS-203) pre-req and the first exam MS-100. I am now preparing for the final exam of MS-101 with hopes to have it completed by beginning to mid-February.

AWS S3 hosted website
In the past, all my websites have been hosted by normal providers. Since I have an interest in getting more experience with Azure and Linux, I decided to host a VM on Azure running CentOS and then installing LAMP to manage it all myself. This site and the Blog/KB – MCSA 365 Lab are both hosted on this VM and allowed me to gain experience with:

Linux CLI

vim/nano

Managing services like firewalld and httpd.

SELinux

WordPress

Azure Security Center

Azure Virtual Machines, DNS, and Storage

Begin prepping for the MS-500 after completion of MS-101.

Migrate content from my personal Confluence to a WordPress KnowledgeBase.

Homelab.
Currently, my homelab consists of a Hyper-V server running 6 VMs. Those VMs are two Windows Server 2016 Domain Controllers for my local AD DS and they’re connecting to Azure via their AD Sync tool for user/password sync. I then have two Windows 10 VMs connected to my Azure AD to use with Endpoint (Intune) policies. A pfSense machine which I use to split my personal and home devices from my Hyper-V guests. Then lastly, I have a services VM running Ubuntu Server 20.04 where I host a few projects including two monitoring tools and a POP/IMAP server.