Seth Hall

IT Professional | Systems Administrator

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.
  • Get in Touch
    • Address . . . . . London, UK
    • Email . . . . . adlard@example.com
    • Phone . . . . . +123 654 78900
    • Freelance . . . . . Available
    Contact Form

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