Samson Owings

Dedicated System Engineer adept at cultivating long-term partnerships with vendors and clients. Expertise includes installing, configuring and monitoring complex systems and infrastructures. Offering successful career history comprising 7 years. Systems Engineer with extensive experience driving network security and accessibility. Highly skilled with system virtualization using VMware and Dell VxRail, along with Windows services Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and Certificate Authority.

Perham History Museum                                           10/2020 to 03/2021

At the history museum I did help desk duties like supply desktops, manage backups, help with any issues that comes up.

Perham ITOW Veterans Museum                             10/2020 to 03/2021

At the ITOW Veterans museum I did help desk duties like supply desktops, manage backups, help with any issues that comes up.

Personally I have a home lab where I have a desktop style computer and laptop. I use the laptop more for all my testing and the desktop more as my "production" server. For home lab use I love docker, the easy of use and setting up new containers is great! I need light weight services to run with out a hassle. 

While at AFBIS one of my special projects was a security check where my manger pinned me against another admin who's focus was in security. My manager wanted to see who could phish him, as he claimed to be unphishable, and who could crack the most passwords in one week. I succeeded in both, for password cracking I used a tool called Hashcat and a combination of  brute force and dictionary attacks. I crack twice as many passwords as my counterpart and many of which had elevated rights. As far as the phishing email, knowing I had to spear phish him I created a special email using MS Word, Active Directory, and Powershell. I sent a the phishing email from my base machine but it came across as the President of the company with an embedded link to "Have I been pwned". Powershell used my account to auth to the email server, it pulled the Presidents profile picture, and it had no external banner as it come from inside the company.  It was only a matter of time until he clicked the link, worked like a charm.

At BCBSND I created a powershell script to implement a DoD STIG for our ESXi hosts. As we have Dell VxRail nodes, Dell hired a third party company to write a similar script using powershell and python. The issue with their script was they assumed all the nodes used the same root password with out any option to input multiple passwords. I rewrote their script just using powershell, with the main difference being Dell's script used SSH to make certain configuration changes. I found a way to make the same changes using PowerCLI, VMWare's powershell module tool to help admins like myself due a multitude of different functions.

At High Point Networks I worked on multiple projects converting servers, mostly domain controllers, to vm's typically with a new virtual environment like ESXI. The experience I grained helped me realize that servers mostly fall into two categories. There are servers that are just services, meaning the data they have can be recreated on the new host with little to no interaction. The other types of servers are full of data that is important to the role of that server, meaning sometimes you are lucky and can copy the data over to the new host or you have to do a physical to virtual conversion or P2V. With the P2V option there are many tools that free and easy to use or there are also more proprietary, just depends on whats best for the scenario.