Maksim Shapovalov
Systems administrator, 17+ years in infrastructure. I build systems that run without heroics — through repeatable procedures, automation, and documentation people can actually follow, not “one person who remembers everything.”
What I do now
Since 2021 — lead systems administrator at AGRICO (Stavropol, a retail and agro-industrial group). I run enterprise-scale infrastructure: Active Directory domains across ~35 virtual machines, a 3-node Exchange DAG mail cluster with automatic failover, MS SQL and PostgreSQL, a 1C landscape (ERP, licensing, distributed agent servers over VPN), Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct, monitoring on Zabbix and SIEM, and web services published through IIS/nginx. The focus is high availability and automation: things that used to mean an on-call night now run on a schedule and only send an alert when something is genuinely wrong.
Background
Before that, I spent 6 years running the IT department of the “Istochnik” health resort (Yessentuki) — everything from strategy and budget to building infrastructure from scratch: LAN, IP telephony, video surveillance, access control. I rebuilt the backup strategy — recovery time dropped 3.5x; migrated key services to Hyper-V — capital costs for a typical system fell 80%. Before that — systems administrator at several companies across Stavropol Krai and Kabardino-Balkaria: networking, Panasonic and Siemens telephony, Proxmox VE, pfSense, Acronis/Duplicity backups — the kind of experience that leaves you looking at any new infrastructure with a clear head instead of by the book.
Windows Server 2008–2022, Active Directory and GPO, Exchange DAG, RDS, WSUS, PowerShell automation.
Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct, Proxmox VE, role consolidation, and fault-tolerant clusters.
1C:Enterprise (ERP, agents, licensing), MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, maintenance schedules.
Zabbix, SIEM, ELK/Filebeat, SPF/DKIM/DMARC mail security, auditing and GPO policy.
An unusual line in the resume
From 2009 to 2016 — junior research fellow at the High-Mountain Geophysical Institute (Nalchik): wrote Delphi software for processing radar data and deployed automated hail-cloud observation systems on MRL-5 and DMRL-C weather radars. That work led to a PhD in physics and mathematics. Not the most obvious path into systems administration — but it’s where I got used to the idea that a script that works “usually” isn’t good enough when real safety decisions ride on it.
Philosophy
Systems, not heroics. Repeatable procedures beat one-off feats; automation isn’t a luxury, it’s hygiene; documentation is part of the deliverable, not something to “do later.” I document failures and postmortems as honestly as successes — otherwise there’s nothing to learn from.
Open source
Besides writing, I also write code. SIPPhone — a native SIP softphone for macOS built on PJSIP: several SIP accounts at once, call waiting and hold, blind and attended transfer, local conferencing, a diagnostic protocol log. Open source, GNU GPL v3 or later.
Outside the day job
I train on TryHackMe, and in 2025 completed the Pre Security course and a “White Hat Hacker” program, plus Fortinet mail-security certification (FortiMail) — keeping skills sharp on the attacker’s side is useful even for purely defensive work. I also write on Habr under the same name as here.
