Bert Darnell
Cybersecurity Professional | Help Desk Specialist
Summary
Help Desk Specialist with hands-on experience supporting critical healthcare IT operations at HVHS. Skilled in Active Directory, system troubleshooting, and managing hospital systems. Recently earned a Bachelor's degree in Information and Computer Science with Cisco CCNAv7 and CyberOps Associate certifications. Actively expanding technical expertise through homelab projects involving virtualization, network security, and Linux system administration. Seeking opportunities to leverage my help desk foundation and growing technical skills in cybersecurity, systems administration, or network engineering roles.
Experience
Help Desk Specialist
Questeq
- Create and close support tickets for hospital-wide technical issues
- Fix computers and systems throughout the hospital environment
- Work with Active Directory for user management and authentication
- Manage and troubleshoot TicketPro and 100+ hospital systems
- Provide rapid response technical support for critical healthcare operations
Direct Support Specialist
Nodaway County Services
Maryville, MO
- Maintained meticulous documentation, ensuring data integrity and confidentiality
- Tracked technical support tickets and user issues with precision
- Provided direct support services while maintaining strict confidentiality protocols
Night Auditor
Holiday Inn & Suites
Maryville, MO
- Performed network administrative tasks including system updates and software upgrades
- Configured printers and troubleshot customer network connectivity issues (DNS resolution)
- Conducted detailed audits, balancing daily financial records and identifying discrepancies
- Resolved technical issues, providing overnight support similar to IT help desk operations
Night Auditor
Cobblestone Inn & Suites
Maryville, MO
- Balanced daily financial records with meticulous attention to detail
- Provided security monitoring during overnight hours
- Troubleshot and resolved guest concerns, showcasing strong problem-solving skills
Personal Projects
Virtualized Homelab Infrastructure
Proxmox VE, Ubuntu Server, Arch Linux, WireGuard, Pi-hole, Unbound, TrueNAS, ZFS
- Designed and deployed virtualized homelab environment using Proxmox VE hypervisor managing 5+ VMs for various services (media server, DNS, VPN, NAS)
- Implemented WireGuard VPN server for secure remote access with split-tunneling configurations for mobile and desktop clients across multiple tunnel interfaces
- Configured PCI GPU passthrough for hardware-accelerated video transcoding, reducing CPU utilization by 85% during media processing using NVENC/NVDEC
- Deployed Pi-hole with Unbound recursive DNS resolver for network-wide ad blocking and enhanced privacy with DNSSEC validation, serving 20+ devices
- Administered TrueNAS SCALE with ZFS storage pools for centralized data management, implementing NFS/SMB shares accessible across network infrastructure
- Developed comprehensive disaster recovery procedures and automated backup strategies for critical system configurations using shell scripting
- Configured advanced firewall rules and network segmentation using iptables for secure service isolation
Education
Bachelor of Science in Information and Computer Science
Park University
Parkville, MO
- Obtained Cisco CCNAv7 and CyberOps Associate certifications through 15 credit hours
- Hands-on experience with NIST SP 800-53 framework
- Performed Cybersecurity Threat and Vulnerability Assessments (CTVA)