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Jeremy Bryan Smith

Jeremy Bryan Smith

Intelligent Systems Design. Infrastructure. Security. Automation. Development. Integrity.

Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Greetings :-) My name is Jeremy Bryan Smith. I design, build, debug, and harden complex Linux-based systems. With over 20 years of experience spanning software development, Linux systems administration, infrastructure engineering, networking, automation, and security-focused systems design, I work at the intersection of software and infrastructure-building systems, understanding how they behave, investigating how they fail, and improving them until they are more reliable, predictable, and easier to understand.

I'm drawn to difficult technical problems, particularly where the documentation is incomplete, the behavior is unexpected, or the system has grown more complicated than it needs to be. My approach is grounded in understanding the underlying mechanisms, using evidence to guide decisions, and solving problems at their root rather than working around their symptoms. I value autonomy, technical curiosity, questioning the status quo, and designs that remain understandable long after they are built.

This site aims to be a working archive of projects, experiments, technical notes, and research from my professional career and personal engineering lab. It documents not only what I have built, but how I approach architecture, troubleshooting, reliability, security, automation, and long-term maintainability.

Projects

Infrastructure platforms, security tooling, virtualization environments, storage systems, and networking work from real deployments and lab experiments.

  • OpenResty / Lua Application Firewall — A custom request-validation framework enforcing strict application-level allowlists before requests reach backend services. OpenResty, Nginx, Lua, HTTP, JSON validation

  • ZFS-Based Backup Framework and Recovery System — A comprehensive backup infrastructure with automated snapshots, retention management, chained local-to-offsite replication, and bare-metal network boot recovery. ZFS, TFTP, PXE, NFS, snapshot holds, replication

  • Hardened Self-Hosted Infrastructure — A privacy-focused platform for secure remote access, internal services, DNS filtering, password management, media, monitoring, and automation. Linux, ZFS, KVM/QEMU, WireGuard, OpenResty, Docker, Lua

  • Networking, DNS, and Secure Remote Access — Private service access, DNS privacy, firewall policy, service discovery, and remote connectivity. WireGuard, OpenVPN, iptables, nftables, DNS-over-TLS, AdGuardHome

  • Virtualization and Lab Infrastructure — A flexible Linux virtualization environment for testing operating systems, services, network designs, and deployment patterns. KVM, QEMU, Proxmox, virtiofs, cloud-init, ZFS

  • Storage Reliability and ZFS Operations — Real-world storage architecture and operational troubleshooting across large pools, replication workflows, snapshots, and recovery scenarios. ZFS, snapshots, send/receive, replication, disk diagnostics

Software

Selected tools, scripts, snippets, and code experiments across Bash automation, Go systems tools, Python utilities, Lua policy engines, Nginx/OpenResty configuration, Linux boot and recovery tooling, storage diagnostics, and network debugging.

Each entry includes the problem it solves, design goals, usage examples, tradeoffs, and future improvements.

Virtualization and Containers

Intelligent use of KVM/QEMU, Proxmox, Docker, virtiofs, and cloud-init to model production, test change safely, and reproduce any environment — from full-system virtualization to per-application container isolation.

Technical Notes

Lessons learned from real systems work — what failed, what worked, what tradeoffs mattered, and what I would do differently next time.

Topics include Linux troubleshooting, infrastructure design, storage reliability, reverse proxy security, self-hosting, virtualization, DNS and networking, open-source tools, and debugging methodology.

About Me

My engineering philosophy, professional background, and contact information.

I prefer systems that are understandable, observable, repairable, and built on open standards. Good infrastructure should be understandable under stress, and good automation should make complex systems more predictable rather than obscuring how they work. I tend to approach difficult problems by understanding the underlying system, gathering evidence, and tracing problems to their root rather than treating symptoms. I value designs that can be reasoned about, operated with confidence, and maintained by the people who inherit them. I’m comfortable working independently, digging into unfamiliar systems and poorly documented behavior, and doing the research necessary to understand how something actually works.