Howard Van Der Wal

Sr. Customer Support Engineer @ CIQ. Rocky Linux Docs Contributor. CKA-certified.

Howard Van Der Wal

Senior Customer Support Engineer @ CIQ & CSM for APAC Customers – Daily Claude Power-User for Linux & Open Source Solutions – Rocky Linux Docs Contributor – CKA-certified – <3 Linux, Open Source & AI

Based in Nasushiobara, Tochigi, Japan

About

I’m an AI and Linux-focused infrastructure engineer with 10+ years of hands-on experience across a wide range of open-source technologies and large-scale HPC environments.

  • Containers & Runtime: Rootless Podman (overlay driver, cgroup v2, user-namespace mapping, subuid/subgid handling), Enroot integration, Docker, OCI image workflows, troubleshooting of container networking (rootless Podman, multicast limits, NFS-shared storage).

  • Orchestration & Scheduling: Deep expertise with Slurm (cgroup v2 migration, prolog/epilog scripts, linger mode, TaskProlog), OpenHPC, Warewulf (server, web UI, overlays, node-image imports).

  • System Administration: Rocky Linux (8, 9 and 10 series), RHEL-compatible distro management, EPEL-archive usage, cgroup v2 enablement, systemd services, XDG_RUNTIME_DIR configuration, PAM, LDAP/Active Directory integration, FIPS compliance, ISO customisation (kickstart, live-OS vs installer ISO).

  • Storage & Data Pipelines: AWS S3, NFS v4, MongoDB, Kafka, ELK stack, Apache NiFi, Zookeeper, Apache HTTPD, Munge, and OCI image registries.

  • Automation & Scripting: Bash/Python for troubleshooting, Markdown documentation, CI/CD pipelines, Podman-wrapper scripts, user-provisioning automation compatible with both Podman and Apptainer.

  • Documentation & Community: Frequent contributor to the Rocky Linux Docs; authored the Expert Contributor Guide and multiple how-to articles (kickstart usage, rootless Podman, cgroup v2 migration, CVE remediation, and more).

  • Communication & Outreach: Recognised repeatedly for delivering exceptional service to CIQ’s customers; business-level Japanese proficiency; strong interpersonal and presentation skills.

  • Public Speaking & Marketing: Produced a public marketing video detailing CIQ Ledger Pro, showcasing product capabilities to a broad audience.

  • AI Usage: Employ Claude and Claude Skills to smartly increase both efficiency and accuracy of troubleshooting in my work. Anything generated by AI is always checked by myself first, to ensure human verification.

I thrive on solving complex, multi-layered problems and continuously expanding my skill set across the open-source ecosystem.

Experience

Sr. Customer Support Engineer – CIQ

October 2024 – Present | Japan, Remote

Promoted to Senior Customer Support Engineering in October 2024; leading complex support cases and driving technical solutions for CIQ’s HPC stack.

  • Customer-first mindset – ensuring every ticket gets thorough analysis, clear communication, and reliable resolution.
  • Core technology expertise:
    • Apptainer – container creation, runtime troubleshooting, and integration with Rocky Linux 8/9/10 environments.
    • Fuzzball – performance-intensive computing platform; helping customers design, run, and optimise large-scale HPC/AI workloads on this container-first orchestration stack.
    • Rocky Linux 8, 9, and 10 – deep knowledge of kernel, kdump/crash-utility analysis, and system-wide tuning for production clusters.
    • Warewulf 4.5.x and 4.6.x – cluster provisioning, node-image management, and disk-layout automation (including Ignition-based disk setup for Rocky Linux 8 and 9).
    • Kubernetes & application-stack troubleshooting – diagnosing pod failures, networking issues, and resource contention in mixed-container/K8s environments.
  • Kernel crash investigations – performing detailed vmcore analysis with the crash utility, extracting root causes from blocked-task, rt-mutex, and cgroup deadlocks.
  • Technical author – producing externally-facing documentation for customers on kb.ciq.com.
  • Customer Success Management – acting as primary CSM for a strategic CIQ client, coordinating support, roadmap feedback, and escalations. Business Japanese is a requirement.
  • Cross-team liaison – collaborating daily with Rocky Linux engineering, Business Development, and Product Management to surface customer needs, influence product improvements, and ensure seamless hand-offs.
  • Marketing – helping the Marketing Team to create content; recently produced a video explaining in-depth how Ledger Pro works and the benefits of seeing your whole fleet of systems.
  • Rocky Linux Documentation – contributing guides to the community such as the Expert Contributor Guide.

Skills: Linux Server, Kubernetes, Docker Products, Technical Documentation, Linux

Customer Support Engineer – CIQ

April 2024 – January 2025 | Japan, Remote

Skills: Linux Server, Kubernetes, Docker Products, Software Troubleshooting, Technical Documentation

Escalation Engineer – Exabeam

May 2022 – April 2024 | Japan, Remote

  • Promoted from Technical Support Engineer to Escalation Engineer in August 2023.
  • Provided the best support to Exabeam’s customers and solved cases in a timely manner.
  • Ran weekly knowledge transfer sessions for the team.
  • Created Confluence Guides to share knowledge with the team and other Exabeam staff.
  • Troubleshot the functionality of Exabeam’s Advanced Analytics, Cloud Collector, Cloud Connector, Cloud Platform, Data Lake, Log Pipeline, Search, Site Collector and more.
  • Interacted with multiple high-profile customers in the APAC region, both via email and in calls, requiring professionalism at all times.
  • Deep knowledge of the Linux (Bash) CLI was mandatory in order to find the problem area within logs.
  • Understanding of Regex was required to work out why certain logs are not parsed correctly.
  • Ansible shell commands and basic YAML scripting was needed to run commands over multiple nodes.
  • Knowledge of Docker containers was required to configure memory allocation for services such as MongoDB.
  • Bash scripting was needed to understand and modify scripts written by the Engineering team, based on a customer’s needs.
  • Apache Kafka knowledge was a must-have for understanding why log ingestion slows down.
  • Apache Hadoop and HDFS was used to sort through the back-end storage of a customer’s environment.
  • Understanding of how Apache Zookeeper works was vital for finding out why certain nodes cannot communicate with each other.
  • Elasticsearch know-how was needed for understanding what data is being placed into certain shards.
  • Knowledge of MongoDB commands was a requisite – as an example – when searching for certain models or rules that are slowing down the environment.
  • Clear and detailed Jira creation for the Engineering team was required.
  • Provided a minimum of bi-hourly updates for Severity 1 cases.
  • Japanese fluency was also required for this role and troubleshooting was done exclusively in Japanese.

Skills: Ansible, Technical Support, Linux, Hadoop, Customer Support, Japanese, Article Writing, Python, Regular Expressions, Apache NiFi, PowerShell, Linux System Administration, Networking, Jira, Apache Kafka, Docker Products, Computer Networking, MongoDB

Assistant Language Teacher – Link Interac Inc., Japan

March 2021 – May 2022 | Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, On-site

  • Assisting students with their written, reading, listening and spoken English, both in and outside the classroom.

Skills: Japanese, Language Teaching

Information Technology Support Engineer – Planetworks K.K.

January 2021 – March 2022 | Tokyo, Japan, On-site (Freelance)

  • 2021/04/25 – Completed network configuration of multiple CISCO routers and switches, working with a remote engineer for a large pharmaceutical customer in Japan.

Skills: Computer Networking

Assistant Language Teacher – Nasu Town Board of Education

May 2018 – February 2021 | Tochigi, Japan

  • Teaching English to nursery, elementary and junior high school children and helping them with their pronunciation and grammar.

Skills: Japanese, Language Teaching

Assistant Language Teacher – Joytalk

September 2017 – April 2018 | Tochigi, Japan, On-site

  • Teaching English at junior high schools, as well as helping children with the prefectural speech contest and EIKEN tests.

Skills: Japanese, Language Teaching

QA Analyst – Team17 Digital

July 2017 – August 2017 | Wakefield, England, United Kingdom

  • Performed functional testing on The Escapists 2, focusing on ad-hoc and regression testing.
  • Carried out non-functional stress and load network testing on The Escapists 2.
  • Wrote clear and concise bug reports using Bugzilla.

Using the grapple hook item, I found the player could easily escape out of the level, which broke all of the game logic. After informing the Programming Team of the bug, it was quickly fixed and allowed the game to reach its milestone deadline within good time.

QA Analyst – Vertigo Games

October 2016 – June 2017 | Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

  • Performed functional and non-functional testing on builds.
  • Carried out specific test plans such as UI Testing, smoke testing and regression testing.
  • Reported issues into JIRA in a concise, accurate and readable manner.
  • Reported on the status of builds.
  • Ensured issues were communicated to relevant parties at daily stand-up meetings.
  • Validated externally reported issues.
  • Provided feedback on features to aid in development and testing.
  • Provided support and debug expertise to the development team.
  • Games worked on:
    • Landfall – an Oculus Rift multiplayer VR dioramic twin-stick shooter.
    • Term1nal – a stealth-hacking Samsung Gear VR puzzle game.

English Instructor – OneUP English School

April 2016 – September 2016 | Tokyo, Japan

  • Preparing, writing and teaching study materials and assessing adult clients on their current English ability, as well as identifying their weaknesses and improving their abilities.

Skills: Japanese, Language Teaching

Assistant Language Teacher – Link Interac Inc., Japan

August 2014 – March 2016 | Okayama, Japan

  • Worked in elementary and junior high schools. At elementary schools I was solely responsible for teaching and planning the lessons and at junior high schools I planned lessons along with the Japanese English teacher.

Skills: Japanese, Language Teaching

Education

BSc (Honours) Ethical Hacking for Computer Security

Northumbria University | September 2010 – July 2014 | First Class

Computer and Information Systems Security/Information Assurance

Activities and societies: Video Game Society, Rock and Metal Society

The course focused on networking, security, programming and the basic understanding of penetration testing tools, methodologies and techniques.

  • Networking – focusing on the CCNA syllabus, covering the OSI model, VLANs, subnetting, routing protocols (RIP, EIGRP, OSPF and so on) and much more.
  • Security – understanding how vulnerabilities occur and ways to mitigate them. Attacks such as cross-site scripting and brute force attacks were simulated in a virtual lab environment. Implementing Metasploit via Kali Linux to initiate attacks was also used.
  • Programming – writing a low level briefcase unlocking application for an Arduino computer in C and creating an x86_64 CPU demonstration using Python and the Pygame library for the final year thesis.

Licences & Certifications

  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator – The Linux Foundation (December 2025 – December 2027, Credential ID LF-Gumuo03kbf)
  • The Project Management Course: Beginner to PROject Manager – Udemy (January 2026)
  • View all 20 certifications on LinkedIn

Charity Projects

Charity Drive to Raise Money for the RFTC Breast Cancer Foundation

August 2019

Raised 17,000 yen for a breast cancer charity in Japan via a 24-hour livestream.

Charity Drive for BBC Microbit Computers at Local Schools

June 2018 | Associated with Nasu Town Board of Education

Raised 66,400 yen in donations for local schools, which bought enough BBC Microbit computers for an entire class of 30 students to learn programming with. The charity event was a 24-hour video game livestream, which I successfully completed.

Charity Drive to Raise Money for Shine On! Kids

October 2015

Raised 90,000 yen after a 30-hour video game livestream for a Japanese children’s charity.

Skills

Linux & Systems

Linux System Administration, Linux Server, Linux Desktop, Linux, Red Hat Linux

Support & Documentation

Technical Support, Customer Support, Technical Documentation, Software Documentation, Software Troubleshooting, Article Writing, Writing

DevOps & Cloud

Kubernetes, Docker Products, Ansible, Apache Kafka, Apache NiFi, Hadoop, MongoDB

Networking & Security

Computer Networking, Wide Area Network (WAN), Network Administration, Routers, Security, Ethical Hacking

Programming

Python, C, C#, Go, HTML, Markdown, Regular Expressions, Git, GitHub

High Performance Computing

High Performance Computing (HPC)

Languages

English (native), Japanese (business-level)

Other

Jira, PowerShell, Quality Assurance, Oculus Rift, Public Speaking, Interpersonal Skills, Communication, Language Teaching, Open Source Software, Software Development

I love AI. <3 Linux, Open Source and AI.

View my LinkedIn profile View my GitHub