About

I’m Djamel Belaid, a systems administrator with more than 15 years in IT. I started on a hospital help desk, grew into systems administration and engineering, and spent a stint in information security along the way. Today I’m a System Administrator III in the insurance industry.

What ties it together: keeping critical systems running, knowing when they aren’t, and being able to bring them back.

What I work on

• Servers and operating systems: Windows and Linux administration, patching, hardening, the daily care that keeps production boring.
• Monitoring and alerting: dashboards are nice, but I care about the alert that fires before users notice, and about tests proving it does.
• Backup and recovery: backups only count once a restore has been tested.
• Security: firewalling, segmentation, intrusion prevention, and detection rules built from real logs.
• Support that scales: I came up through first-, second- and third-tier support, and it still shapes how I document and automate.

Experience

Ten years of that was in healthcare IT, supporting hospital systems that can’t go down: network servers, interface engines, ancillary clinical systems and environmental monitoring, around the clock, with backup and recovery procedures to match.

Certifications

• ITIL 4 Foundation, AXELOS (2023)

The homelab

Outside work I run a homelab: a Linux server, a NAS and a segmented UniFi network for my household. It’s where I try things before I’d trust them at work: monitoring and alerts as code, a self-hosted password manager with no open ports, a log pipeline with intrusion-detection alerts, and detection rules mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. The writing section documents it, mistakes included.

Languages

French (native) and English (professional).