Aaron Sprague

Self-Taught Network and Systems Engineer

Get to know me...

I grew up in Baldwinsville, NY, where I graduated from Charles W. Baker High School with my Advanced Regents Diploma in 2019. Although I had taken many computer science classes throughout high school, I attended SUNY Brockport, where I pursued a major in Mathematics with a concentration in Actuarial Science. The COVID-19 pandemic occurred during my second semester at Brockport, where my time spent at home encouraged me to invest time in my hobbies, which led to the creation of my first server.
From there, I changed my major to Computer Science with a concentration in Software Development and explored my interests involving my server. Over time, I learned more from hands-on experience gained through my hardware and troubleshooting issues that arose from mistakes. Today, these skills have culminated in over five years of experience with computer systems and networking hardware/software.

My Primary Professional Skills

Systems Administration

Using consumer and enterprise hardware, I have implemented sophisticated and reliable computer systems and servers. The most notable of which focuses on redundancy and high availability.

Network Administration

Through managing my computer systems, I discovered different and complex ways to route and protect the applications I host within my network.

Web Development

Utilizing WordPress, I am skilled in making visually appealing websites that fit design specification standards. Including but not limited to aesthetics, color palette, and accessibility.

Projects and Services

TrueNAS

TrueNAS was the first server OS I used to create my NAS. Utilizing TrueNAS, I made a RAID data array, which allows me to protect the data stored on my TrueNAS server. This server was named Apollo 1, using a naming convention I picked up from my 1.5 years in the robotics club in high school.

Plex Media Server

Starting with Apollo 1, I created a Plex Media Server so I may stream my personal media either at home or away. I have used Plex on all the variations of my NAS servers that I have owned, echoing the same name as the server itself.

Unraid

Approximately 8 months after starting my TrueNAS server, I bought new, more powerful consumer hardware to replace the old hardware from my TrueNAS server. During this upgrade, I copied all of my data to a single hard drive to change the OS to Unraid. This allowed me to scale my data array more economically since I wasn’t bound to the constraints of RAID. This server was called Apollo 2.

Kavita

The Second personal media self-hosted service I started was Kavita. Kavita is an ebook reader, which I use to host my library of ebooks or to download my ebooks to various devices for offline viewing.

Nextcloud

I installed Nextcloud to test whether it is realistic to switch to a self-hosted cloud storage service. I first installed it with underwhelming results; however, when the Nextcloud team came out with their All-In-One solution, I tried it with moderate improvements. I still tinker around with Nextcloud, hoping it will eventually improve from upgrading the current hard drives to SSDs.

Ollama

A while back, I heard of Ollama, an open-source Large Language Model platform. Although I don’t find AI that useful, I installed it with its associated UI platform, OpenWebUI. Although I don’t often use Ollama to chat, I do enjoy expanding on its capabilities, which could be as simple as text-to-speech and speech-to-text, or more complex like retrieval augmented generation and offline search with SearXNG.