Curriculum Vitae - Alec Thomas

Date of Birth
1974-04-07
Residence
22/53 Helen Street,
Lane Cove, Sydney 2066,
Australia
E-Mail
alec@swapoff.org
Mobile Phone
+61410418806
Home Phone
+61294271105
Availability
One month
Web site
http://swapoff.org

Overview

I have been using Linux for around ten years and Solaris for five, with some experience in other UNIX flavours during that time.

I have had experience with performance analysis, tuning and capacity planning; problem prevention, detection and resolution; disaster recovery; documentation; system automation with scripts, network and system scale; network security and firewall implementation and concepts; security, access control and data integrity; securing and hardening UNIX systems.

In conjunction with system administration, I have been programming for approximately thirteen years in a variety of languages, five of which have been in professional environments in addition to three at University. I have development experience with system automation utilities (both command line and web based), compiler design, integrating scripting systems into applications (including Java, JavaScript and Python), graphics and web development (with Python, PHP and JavaScript).

Employment History

UNIX Administrator at SingTel Optus, Australia, Oct 2002 - Current

SingTel Optus is the second largest carrier in Australia. I was employed at Optus as a member of the Business Network Operations team responsible for the maintenance of over 350 production UNIX systems. This involved experience with a wide variety of UNIX flavours, including Solaris, RedHat, Nokia IPSO firewalls, HP-UX (on SuperDome), Tru64 and Alteon Switch Firewalls. Across these platforms runs a wide range of services, including NNTP (Cyclone and Typhon), DNS (BIND9), RADIUS (Radiator), LDAP (OpenLDAP), Oracle, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, CheckPoint Firewall-1 and Provider-1, to name a few. A variety of clustering systems are also used, but primarily Veritas Cluster Server.

My role at Optus demanded strong troubleshooting skills in a complex network environment, frequently requiring coordination with different technology groups such as routing, switching, firewalls, etc.

While at Optus also had the opportunity to develop several systems which are now invaluable parts of the support infrastructure:

  • An asset management system with a web based front-end written in PHP and database back-end, now used by nearly all the Engineering and Operation groups.
  • Built, developed and deployed a centralised server for performing administrative tasks in bulk, utilising SSH and the asset database for accurate host information
  • A centralised syslog server with database back-end and both console and web-based front-end in Perl with filtering and colouring
  • Developed a high performance parallel polling system and web interface in Perl for visualising UNIX host statistics.
  • Developed a cross-platform (Slackware and Solaris) package build system with full dependency support. This system is used for all custom built packages in the Business Networks arm.

UNIX Administrator at Standard Chartered Bank, United Kingdom, Nov 2000 - Jul 2001

Contracted by Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) to support their United Kingdom mail server/DNS/firewall farm running on Solaris. These systems served London, Cardiff and Jersey whilst also being the failover mail and DNS servers for the United States. This involved the use and maintenance of HP OpenView, IT Operations, Veritas Netbackup, Sendmail, BIND and FW1. The role also involved training permanent staff in the use of the systems and their applications as well as documenting the processes involved in maintaining the systems.

Major projects included rebuilding several of the machines from the operating system up, including reinstalling and reconfiguring HP OpenView, ITO, Netbackup, Sendmail and FW1. All servers were fully mirrored, and backed up.

Another project involved redesigning the backup plan for the server farm, which involved fully reconfiguring NetBackup.

UNIX Administrator at Access Gaming Systems, Australia, Nov 1999 - Nov 2000

Access Gaming Systems are a development house with primarily Solaris infrastructure. As an administrator of these machines, I helped maintain the development environment for around 150 developers and users. My responsibilities included managing system resources, backups (Veritas NetBackup), upgrading the systems (we overhauled the production network, rebuilding the master NIS+ server, mail server, DNS/DHCP server and main file server) as well as general administration. I was initially hired to automate a lot of the system administration tasks and to develop a system monitoring strategy that would ease the load on the system administrators. This involved a large amount of programming in C++ and PHP (writing easy to use interfaces to common administrative tasks such as mail alias changes and a full help desk system with mail capturing and job control) as well as a considerable amount of shell scripting.

Prior to University I was mostly involved in small contract work; custom databases, small network setup, etc. Full history available on request.

Skill Summary

Operating Systems

  • Excellent knowledge of Linux and the x86 hardware/software environment.
  • Excellent knowledge of Solaris in a large scale Enterprise environment.
  • Basic knowledge of HP-UX, Nokia IPSO, Alteon Switched Firewalls, Cisco IOS.

Network Infrastructure

  • Thorough knowledge of firewalls and how they influence the network.
  • Excellent IP troubleshooting skills, specifically pertaining to UNIX systems.
  • Experience with routing infrastructure and troubleshooting routing issues.
  • Knowledge of switching infrastructure and how layer-2 issues can affect UNIX servers.
  • Thorough knowledge of a range of protocols including HTTP, FTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, NNTP, NTP, DHCP, LDAP, etc.

Programming/Scripting Languages

  • Current with Python, Perl, C++, Shell script, AWK, JavaScript and HTML.
  • I have also had fairly extensive experience with C, PHP, Pascal, BASIC and x86 Assembly Language in the past, but am not current.
  • Dabbled in Java, Objective-C and others.

Software

  • Firewall-1 and Provider-1, IPTables, IP Filter, Firewall Builder.
  • MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQLite.
  • Apache 1 and 2, some Netscape Enterprise Server, Squid.
  • RRDTool, MRTG, Cacti, Cricket.
  • Dovecot, Exim, Sendmail, Cyrus IMAP.
  • Squid, SOCKS5.
  • SpamAssassin, ClamAV
  • Cyclone, Typhoon
  • BIND9

Education and Training

1997-1999
Bachelor of Computer Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Training
Various training courses including Solaris Advanced Administration II, Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Cluster, TruCluster, Alteon Switched Firewalls and HP Enterprise Virtual Array.

Technical Interests

From a UNIX perspective, I am particularly interested in clustering technology; specifically high availabilty, cluster file systems, shared storage. I find virtual server partitioning, ala Xen and Linux VServer, exceptionally interesting.

On the development side of things I get great pleasure from developing well thought out and extensible interfaces to the programs I create. The ultimate goal, to cater for ideas that I have not yet thought of while maintaining an elegant and simple system.

I have developed several Open Source projects, including Dev Todo and On Dir, and have adopted the op package originally written by Tom Christiansen and Dave Koblas. In addition this is a dump of a lot of projects I have flirted with.

I am currently quite involved in the Trac community, building and operating the Trac-Hacks plugin and extension site, and developing the ticket workflow features of Trac.

Career Goals

My main goal in my career, as well as in life, is to avoid stagnation and complacency and do interesting things; creativity and learning are my main motivators.