Thierry Lafeber

About

Driven IT specialist with over 6 years of hands-on systems-administration experience and 10 years in IT in total. What started as a hobby has grown into my craft — I'm fascinated by everything to do with computers and infrastructure. My real strength is behind the scenes: optimising infrastructure and automating processes to make environments more stable and secure.

Outside of work I run my own home lab on TrueNAS SCALE — Docker workloads, segmented networks, mesh VPN with Netbird and Wireguard, encrypted off-site backups via Restic, and a self-hosted Nextcloud cloud reachable through a Pangolin reverse proxy.

Core skills

Operating Systems

• Windows 11 / 10
• Windows Server 2012–2024
• Linux (Ubuntu, Debian)
• Unraid
• TrueNAS Core / SCALE
• Android
• iOS

Infrastructure & Virtualization

• Hyper-V
• VMware
• KVM
• Docker
• Active Directory
• Microsoft Entra
• Office 365
• Intune
• SCCM
• VEEAM
• ZFS

Networking & Security

• Fortigate
• SonicWall
• HPE / Aruba
• Wireguard
• Netbird
• Pangolin
• Netskope
• DUO MFA
• SentinelOne
• Mimecast
• Outpost24
• AppLocker

Tools & Automation

• PowerShell
• Jira
• Confluence
• Atlassian Insight
• AutoTask
• ManageEngine
• Bitwarden / Vaultwarden
• 1Password
• Apple Business Manager

Experience

IT Support — Omni Bridgeway, Amsterdam (03/2024 — present)

Hybrid AD / Entra environment. PowerShell automation for onboarding, Office 365 tenant, Intune, Bitwarden, Mimecast, Netskope and SentinelOne. Fortigate firewalls, Microsoft Servers 2019/2022/2024 and full Windows 11 hardware compliance.

Systems Administrator — Openbare Bibliotheken Amsterdam (OBA) (2021 — 2024)

Hyper-V cluster across multiple nodes, hybrid AD / Entra, HPE & Aruba switching, SonicWall and Fortigate firewalls. Built ZFS-based backup with VEEAM, ran out-of-band Wireguard VPN and supported the organisation's Change Advisory Board.

ICT Support Engineer — Openbare Bibliotheken Amsterdam (OBA) (10/2019 — 2021)

Frontline support and infrastructure for one of the largest public library organisations in the Netherlands. Promoted into the Systems Administrator role in 2021.

ICT All-rounder (Self-employed) — Busan, South Korea (2017 — 10/2019)

Lived in South Korea on a Working Holiday visa and studied Korean at Kyungsung University Busan. On the side I ran my own ZZP business doing on-site IT support and hardware repairs, and built and operated a personal multi-OS home server for hosting and self-learning.

Powerservice Employee — MediaMarkt Amsterdam Centrum (08/2016 — 10/2017)

Frontline soft- and hardware support inside the store's Powerservice department, a team of 8 supporting customers across Windows, macOS and mobile.

Internship, Web Development — Go2People Websites (01/2017 — 07/2017)

Graduation internship building WordPress websites and webshops for large clients.

Internship, Local Support — CGI, Amstelveen (2016)

Service desk internship supporting users across MS Office 365: Active Directory and Windows Server 2003–2016 environments.

Internship, Junior Systems Administrator — Questcontrol, Wormerveer (2015)

First systems internship at a multimedia and toy wholesaler — incident handling, Active Directory user management and hardware deployment.

Home Lab

• TrueNAS SCALE Home Lab — self-hosted server running Docker workloads, ZFS storage and segmented networks.
• Self-hosted Nextcloud — personal cloud for files, calendar and contacts via a Pangolin reverse proxy with TLS termination.
• Mesh VPN & Network Segmentation — zero-trust mesh with Netbird and Wireguard; VLANs separate trusted, IoT and lab traffic.
• Encrypted Off-site Backups — Restic with encrypted, deduplicated snapshots replicated off-site.
• Database Sandbox — PostgreSQL, MariaDB and SQLite in containers for testing and learning.
• Monitoring & Orchestration — Komodo for container orchestration, Beszel for infrastructure monitoring.

Education & Certificates

• MBO ICT, Niveau 4 — Regio College Zaandam (2014 – 2017)
• VMBO Techniek Breed — Compaen VMBO Zaandam (2010 – 2014)
• ITIL 4 Foundation — Service Management
• Administering System Center Configuration Manager — Microsoft
• Microsoft Security Fundamentals — Microsoft
• Windows Operating System Fundamentals — Microsoft

Get in touch

For roles in IT specialist, systems administration, infrastructure engineering or related areas in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, please reach out via LinkedIn or the contact section of this site.

Based in Zaanstad, Netherlands. Available for on-site work in the Amsterdam region and remote across NL.