{"id":93192,"date":"2019-10-24T09:50:46","date_gmt":"2019-10-24T16:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=93192"},"modified":"2025-07-20T06:01:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T13:01:14","slug":"digital-nomad-sysadmin-elliott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/digital-nomad-sysadmin-elliott\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Nomad: Sysadmin Elliott"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Digital Nomads Series<\/h2>\n

In this blog series<\/a>, we explore how you can master the nomadic life — whether for a long weekend, an extended working vacation, or maybe even the rest of your career. We profile professionals we\u2019ve met who are stretching the boundaries of what (and where) an office can be, and glean lessons along the way to help you to follow in their footsteps. In our first post in the series, we provided practical tips for working on the road<\/a>. In this edition, we profile our very own Elliott Sims, Senior Sysadmin, who successfully completes his work for Backblaze while he and his wife and dog travel the country.<\/p>\n

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How does a Backblaze Senior Systems Administrator manage to look after Backblaze\u2019s network and computer systems while working remotely? He does it by planning ahead to ensure a solid connection to our network at every destination and having multiple options to make sure he’s never without a connection.<\/p>\n

As a Senior Sysadmin, Elliott is responsible for doing whatever it takes to keep Backblaze’s services up and running. That ranges from network and Ansible (an IT automation tool) configuration to working with engineering to triage problems or design future systems. Elliott describes his job as a mixture of fixing what’s broken and ensuring that things are less likely to break in the future.<\/p>\n

\"Elliott<\/a>
Elliott Sims, Backblaze Senior Sysadmin and Digital Nomad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tenacious planning comes naturally to Elliott. It\u2019s why he\u2019s in his position: he enjoys technical challenges that might deter others, like fixing systems that fail in complicated and hard-to-track-down ways. Previous to Backblaze, Elliott worked for EDS\/HP as a systems administrator and later for Facebook as a site reliability engineer and operations engineer. He made the move to Backblaze after he decided he wanted to work with a smaller team. The idea of working for a company that offered a useful service to people outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, where many companies only offer services to one another, was especially appealing.<\/p>\n

Elliott and his wife, Robin, got the travel bug during their month-long honeymoon. They didn’t like dealing with unfamiliar hotel rooms and beds and the many places that don’t accept dogs (there was no way they were leaving Stitch<\/em> behind), so they made the decision to bring their home with them on their travels. In July 2018, they purchased a 19′ Escape trailer RV<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Elliott admits that his choice of vehicles reflects his operations mentality: He wants to stay many steps ahead of what can go wrong in any<\/em> situation. The Escape travel trailer is solidly built out of two pieces of molded fiberglass, which presents fewer seams where water could leak in. It also is equipped with lithium batteries that last longer and charge faster than other options, which is essential for someone who is using the RV as a mobile office.<\/p>\n

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Escape 19 RV (stock photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Shortly after acquiring the Escape, Elliott and Robin made a commitment to live one year on the road. After six months, they realized that a year would not be long enough. Just one month in Washington, D.C. was clearly insufficient for them to get the know the area as well as they wanted. They changed their plans and resolved to stay on the road indefinitely.<\/p>\n

How a Sysadmin Works Remotely<\/h2>\n

While most companies might not like the idea of a Senior Sysadmin working away from the office, Backblaze didn\u2019t blink. And why would we? Through good planning, Elliott is rarely out of touch with the crew back in San Mateo and in our data centers, and at least once a quarter he visits us in San Mateo along with the rest of the remote Backblaze team. The rest of the time he\u2019s on his own and makes it work despite the varying quality and availability of broadband he encounters on his travels.<\/p>\n

Elliott’s Setup<\/h3>\n

Planning ahead means that Elliott knows what kind of broadband to expect at his next destination. It needs to be reliable and fast, as he’ll be working from that location for a number of days.<\/p>\n

His first choice for a reliable broadband connection is Wi-Fi, but that’s not always available or sufficiently fast, so he has backup options that include multiple cellular plans and devices. When Wi-Fi doesn’t work for him, he can turn to one of his cellular routers or even tether his computer to his phone.<\/p>\n

Wi-Fi<\/h4>\n

For Wi-Fi, Elliott uses a directional antenna on his Ubiquiti router to reach access points. He has learned that most of the time the limiting factor isn’t the range to the access point but the backhaul from the WiFi access point to the internet — frequently it just can’t handle the bandwidth required. He explains that public Wi-Fi in urban areas typically has a better backhaul, but unfortunately places like restaurants and cafes often block VPN and SSH, which makes using it for work difficult.<\/p>\n

Cellular<\/h4>\n

When he started out, Elliott had cellular plans with both AT&T and Verizon through resellers. But after a couple of weeks, the AT&T plan suddenly stopped working and Elliott couldn’t reach the reseller for help. His other plan on Verizon worked OK, but at the same time as AT&T quit on him, Verizon dropped from 4G down to 3G and stayed there. Unfortunately, 3G is being replaced with 4G in many areas, so that limited this options. To add insult to injury, it turned out that the Verizon plan was tied to a specific router, which Elliott had left at home in favor of a dual-SIM unit he was using. Topping it all off was the fact that all of this happened in the middle of nowhere along US-50 in Nevada.<\/p>\n

There weren’t any local retail options Elliott could turn to for a fix. He made do for a time with the fair-to-poor RV park Wi-Fi and tethering his laptop to his phone, but cellular gets expensive and Wi-Fi goes downhill fast around 5 p.m. when all the RVers fire up their favorite movie streaming service. Elliott made the decision to turn to the only carrier he knew of with a viable and unlimited plan at that particular moment, T-Mobile. When he reached the next town he signed up for T-Mobile and added that SIM in the router.<\/p>\n

Failure is Not an Option — Plan C<\/em><\/h4>\n

As we said earlier, Elliott’s job at Backblaze is making sure that essential data center systems are always working, no matter what. So, we can expect that just Wi-Fi and multiple cellular plans wouldn’t be enough to satisfy Elliott. That’s why he also has a Plan C<\/em> in his connectivity toolbox. This plan involves tethering his laptop to his phone. It works, but is expensive at $10\/GB and doesn’t have the coverage of Verizon or AT&T.<\/p>\n

Plan C<\/em> takes advantage of Google Fi<\/a>, a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that can switch between cellular and Wi-Fi services depending on what’s available, even including less known cell service providers like Commnet, which Elliott encountered while visiting the Grand Canyon.<\/p>\n

When he doesn’t have Wi-Fi and can’t make a cellular connection from his dual-SIM cellular router, Elliott can tether his laptop to his phone and use one of the carriers that aren’t Verizon or AT&T. Elliott says he hasn’t fallen back to tethering much due to the high cost, but he’s glad it’s there if everything else fails.<\/p>\n

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Elliott’s Mobile Office Setup<\/p>\n