Kevin Kirk — Lone Star Specialist
Senior IT professional and the contractor behind Lone Star Specialist — infrastructure, security, virtualization, and access-control work, available for remote contract engagements.
I'm Kevin Kirk, and Lone Star Specialist is my Texas-based IT contracting practice. I take on focused contract work for teams that need a senior hand for a set window — bounded engagements I can scope, own, and close out cleanly.
I'm hands-on with the stack most mid-market IT shops actually run. That's four years across RHEL and Windows servers, VMware and Nutanix clusters, Cisco switching and firewalls, Rubrik backup, NetApp storage, and Splunk SIEM (security information and event management). I also run Software House C·CURE 9000 for access control and Axis IP video for surveillance. That work includes DoD STIG hardening for federal and regulated systems, following the DISA STIG library and NIST 800-53 mappings. I hold 7 active certs across systems, networking, virtualization, and security.
On the web side, I ship modern marketing sites and small web apps. The stack is Astro, Tailwind, and TypeScript — deployed to Cloudflare Pages and Workers, with KV or D1 (key-value and SQL storage) and the source kept in Git. This site is built that way.
What you get: I can drop into a runbook, ship a migration, harden a fleet, stand up SIEM coverage, build the marketing site, or cover an admin gap — without a six-week ramp-up.
More on the practice
I run Lone Star Specialist, a Texas-based IT contracting practice. I'm a senior IT professional with 4+ years of production infrastructure work and 7 active certifications across systems administration, networking, virtualization, and security.
My method comes down to three habits: write the runbook before I make the change, validate against named gates, and leave deliverables in your repository with comments that survive after the engagement closes. Compliance work follows the DISA STIG library and NIST 800-53 control mappings.
The fastest path to a fit assessment is the contact page. Engagements are scoped as bounded project windows with clear start and end dates.