Hey,
My name is Matthew Cullis, and I’m an IT engineer. Living in North Canberra, I support local small and medium businesses with their IT needs so they can focus on their business. I am also an urbanist, and I am active with Living Streets Canberra. It is important to me that all urbanites can move about their city with ease and not be restricted to only a single form of transport.
I have been with Eagle IT now for 5 years working in a number of areas to ensure our clients are able to operate their businesses without having to worry about how things work in the background. My experience at Eagle IT is not limited to end user support, but also includes proactive action on identified risks. I have also done multiple migrations from on premise systems to cloud systems such as Microsoft 365 and Azure Cloud.
I have skills in networking and also have skills with working within Linux environments such as Debian and Red Hat (CentOS / Oracle Linux). In fact, if you follow me on Mastodon, know the instance I am on is running on a Linux VM hosted in my apartment.
Running my own environment has greatly help to extend my knowledge and experience. This all started with the re-use of an old 2008 Intel MacBook which I ended up running FreePBX on. This was to solve an issue with a large home I was living in at the time. My now sister-in-law was able to call me and my now husband to tell us know dinner was ready without yelling.
Today, I have three virtual Linux servers running on re-used hardware. This hosts for my husband and I, a Minecraft server, print services including wireless label printing, a Plex server for media consumption including music, our FreePBX server and my Mastodon instance which has been more of a recent addition.
Hosting at home was something I started doing before I started work in IT. I didn’t even have qualifications. But it was something I was interested in. So I kept doing and learning.
In terms of Living Streets Canberra, this is a journey that started long ago. I had always been a person that love public transport. I would be super excited about any new development in Canberra when it came to public transport. For me, public transport always gave me a sense of freedom. For some people, this is a car, but it was the bus that gave me the freedom to get about Canberra.
At some point, I got sucked into online content of what it is like elsewhere around the world in terms of how people live and move about. Not Just Bikes really opened my world view and I started to understand what felt off about Canberra, and that we could have better.
It wasn’t too long before the then working algorithm on Facebook got me connected with Living Streets Canberra. I met the convenor, and since then have been involved in what I can to have an impact.
Living Streets Canberra’s goal is to make all streets safe, comfortable and inclusive of everybody outside of the car no matter what their ability is. This is a mission I feel strongly for and so I participate in any way I can to help the cause. What exactly does my role involved? Well, a range of things. Aside from your standard service desk work, I am managing networks and Entra environments for our clients. I am also providing them with advice regarding their environments, especially around risks.
If you are interested in Living Streets Canberra, you can visit our website to see what we are up to here.
I am also a casual photographer, but lately I haven’t been as active in this space. I hope this will change soon. I take all sorts of different photos, but I do take quite a lot of bird photos. My partner loves birds, and I quite enjoy their nature.