My name is Patrick Banholzer. I love my family, music and IT.
Family
The most important thing in my life is my family. I have a wonderful wife and two wonderful children who put a smile on my face every day. Watching my kids grow and realizing each day another thing they just learned is more than money can buy.
Music
I love music. Many people think I only love heavy metal music but that’s not the whole truth. Heavy Metal is the music I like most but I also love classics, jazz, swing, some hip-hop and even some electric music (especially dubstep). If you are interested in which music I like most: Lamb of God is my favourite.
IT
Information Technology / IT was always part of my life since I was able to use a keyboard. The journey of going into professional IT topics began somewhere around the time when y2k-problem made everyone mad. This was the time when I bought my first “own” computer. At this time LAN parties were quite common and I started to run these parties on my own and this is not possible without any knowledge of computer networking.
Over the years I’ve seen many technologies and got a lot of experience in different topics. And today I can resume, that I am a specialist on many IT infrastructure and autotomation subjects including Linux, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, Pipelines (Jenkins), Docker, K8s, Virtualization, Storage, Networking, Wifi, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, Docker, Windows Networks, Kerberos, Active Directory, … and also scripting languages and due to my current job automotive EE things.
In my current job I build automated testing setups for automated driving projects at Mercedes-Benz AG. Previously I was responsible for the operations of 2300+ Ubuntu desktops at Mercedes-Benz AG. These are operated in a DevOps approach using Infrastructure as Code with Saltstack. In addition I am also a valued expert and discussion partner for my colleagues in all questions concerning IT infrastructure. Before I applied for the position at Mercedes-Benz I was a teamlead of seven employees for IT infrastructure operations at IT-Designers Gruppe with a team that build aswell the company own IT infrastructure as the IT infrastructure of clients.
For me IT is not just my job. I’m interested in many technologies and I also implement a lot of commonly called “enterprise technologies” at home. Just because I love IT. I’m interested a lot in security, scalability and automation. Therefore I have a seprarate firewall pfSense set up at home that blocks traffic from outside (I don’t trust my ISP) and also blocks traffic that shouldn’t be there. My network is separated in differend VLANs and these are protected by the firewall. So neither vacuum cleaner nor my washing mashine can access my computer network or leak any data to someone who should not have it. I have a virtualization host setup with Proxmox that runs several containers and vms for my Nextcloud, HomeAutomation, Wiki, Git, … I try to use OpenSource wherever possible - my home-automation is based on OpenHAB and uses ShellyCloud Actors and sensors. My Wifi is running with Unifi Access-Points which actually run on Linux.