Security Maintenance

Avleen Vig

Personal Summary, Accomplishments and Objective:

An experienced Systems Engineer with over 10 years demonstrated Unix and Windows

administration and engineering experience including network communications and

Unix/Windows cross-platform integration.

Versed in the development, installation, maintenance and growth of large-scale ISP

infrastructures for Internet services.

I was previously the founder of the SAFE project: http://www.silverwraith.com/smurf (now

retired).

In 2 months, the SAFE Website became the de-facto source of information on Smurf Denial

of Service attack prevention for SuSe Linux and has earned noted recommendations from

FreeBSD. It was a significant contributor to reducing the number of exploitable systems

globally before 2004.

I have also had several technical papers published on O'Reilly ONLamp, Slashdot, and

Freebsd.org. They are all available from http://silverwraith.com/.

I am seeking a challenging role in the Systems Engineering field, where I can actively

deal with architecture and development of large and small scale systems.

Professional skills:

Well versed in the installation, configuration and administration of:

UNIX: Solaris, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, some AIX 4.x

Linux: Redhat, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, some S.u.S.e and Slackware

Sun specific hardware: E3xxx, E4xxx, E6500, V100, V120, V200, V210,

220r/240r/280r, 440r/480r, Ultra2, Ultra5, T1, 1405.

Sun clone hardware: Fujitsu Primepower 450 and 650, Axil

Dell specific hardware: 1600 and 1700 series 1U servers, 2600 and 2800 series 2U servers

Authentication: Kerberos, NIS and Radius authentication mechanisms

Database: PostgreSQL, MySQL, LDAP, some Oracle

DNS: BIND 8 and 9, tinydns and dnscache

IP communication protocols: TCP, UDP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, DNS, NetBIOS

Mass Storage: Network Appliance Filer and Webcache product setup, deployment and

maintenance

Mail: SMTP over Exim, Qmail and some Sendmail, IMAP and POP over Courier Imap

Security: IPF, IPFW, SNORT, Cisco ACL, some CheckPoint FW-1 maintenance

Web: Nginx, Apache and IIS webservers

Languages and scripting:

Fluent: Python, Perl, Unix Shell, Sed, Awk, PHP, HTML

Debugging: Ruby, ASP, VB, C, C++

Web frameworks: Django, Smarty, Symfony

Education:

UK based education:

10 GCSE's including English, Mathematics, Sciences and Technology (equiv. High School)

National Certificate in Information Technology (equiv. pre-college higher education)

Employment History:

August 2010 - : Etsy, Inc

Brooklyn, NY

Senior Systems Administrator

Primarily tasked with designing, implementing and maintaining a highly scalable

infrastructure. Worked closely with developers on existing and new products to ensure they

were as stable and reliable as possible to decrease visible downtime. Responsible for the

day-to-day operation of a large cluster of MySQL Master-Master replication shards, web

servers, and all other infrastructure required to run the Etsy website.

In 2011, I ran the Operations side of a large project to build out Etsy's own payments

system which launched in January 2012. Subsequently I ran another large project to provide

business continuity and disaster recovery between multiple data centers, working closely

with developers to ensure systems were able to work in multi-master, or master-slave

configurations

January 2009 - August 2010: Woo Media, Inc

Portland, Oregon and London, UK

Senior Systems Administrator

Worked with a team of two other systems administrators to grow and manage the server and

application infrastructure for a fast growing startup.

Responsible for every aspect of the system life cycle from provisioning, installation and

deployment, to monitoring, maintenance and retirement.

Deployed Puppet for configuration management which reduced the number of deployment

related errors to almost zero and significantly improved the ability of the team to

managed a fast growing set of servers.

Took a number of performance improvement measures - replacing lighttpd with nginx, tuning

the interface to the django application tier and improving the database pooling mechanisms

to overall improve the load capacity without increasing costs or manageability of the

system.

August 2008 - Present: Silverwraith Ltd

Portland, Oregon and London, UK

Started a small business, offering consulting and engineering services to businesses in

the US and Europe

Clients:

Deutsche Bank, London

Migrating an internal critical web hosting platform from Linux to Solaris 10, and

consolidating two separate platforms into a single unified entity.

Evony, LLC, USA

Lead systems administrator, managing and leading all technical direction for the systems

administration team. Lead a team of 6 systems administrators to stabilise the

infrastructure from a completely unknown and unmanaged state to a fully managed, monitored

and stable state.

Major projects designed, lead and managed:

Migrate from a managed hosting provider to purchased equipment with two separate co-

location providers. Net cost saving of over $70,000/month with improved performance and

uptime.

Hiring a building a systems administration team from scratch. Hired three systems

administrators in geographically diverse locations, and established a system to provide

24/7 coverage.

Set up monitoring and metrics systems. The initial environment had no monitoring, this

was set up and an on-call rotation enabled with SLA's to provide proper response times and

expectations for recovery.

Email campaign system. Designed and created an email messaging campaign for subscribed

users. The system tracked messages from creation to delivery to ISP, and provided

reporting on how many emails were delivered, opened, had links clicked, and led to

purchases.

August 2005 - August 2008: Google, Inc

1600 Amphitheater Pkwy

Mountain View

CA, USA, 94043

Systems Administrator

Responsible for creating and maintaining software used by data centre techs worldwide.

These were written in Python (Django framework), using MySQL backend databases in high-

availability master-slave configurations. Installed and maintained clusters of tens of

thousands of Linux servers around the world.

Developed and implemented the Hardware Operations group's first release engineering

procedures based on ITIL/ISO20000 specifications. This was presented at the LISA

conference in 2007.

Assisted Datacenter Technicians with troubleshooting complex hardware and software

problems in very large server clusters.

Leadership: Mentored and helped 10 juniors systems administrators grow to promotion.

Responsible for time and project management, as well as escalations from this staff.

Worked closely with other development groups to integrate software with hardware.

2002 - July 2005: Earthlink, Inc

2547 Bradley Street

Pasadena

CA, USA, 91107

Technical Team Lead (March 2005 - July 2005)

Promoted to Technical Team Lead in 2005. Responsible for overseeing all technical

decisions regarding EarthLink's production systems. This includes new deployments,

escalations of problems, providing third-tier support along side senior systems

administrators. Also responsible for the development of new technical policies within the

production operations team. As part of their work, the Technical Team Leads worked with

management to restructure the production systems operations group to provide better

support of systems.

Unix Systems Administrator (April 2002 - March 2005)

Unix Systems Administrator on the Graveyard (night/3rd) shift. Responsible for the daily

maintenance of high-availability customer-visible systems. Regularly performing hardware

maintenance on equipment from a variety of vendors. All hardware maintenance is performed

by Systems Admins, with vendors rarely called for assistance, building up a thorough

understanding of software and hardware components. Most scheduled outages are performed on

this shift, and so exposure to software and hardware for maintenance is very high. Also

responsible for end-to-end start, planning and completion of outages of all scales and

visibilities. Completely managing medium-scale projects of systems configuration updates,

new software deployments, and infrastructure planning with customer visibility up to 5

million accounts, and over 10 million individual users. Created and maintained a technical

documentation library based around DocBook XML to centralize the department's technical

information.

June 2000 - October 2001: Internet Vision Ltd

60 Albert Court

Prince Consort Road

London, UK, SW7 2BE

Information Security Officer, Systems Administrator

The primary contact for security related, both internal to the company and from clients.

Developed and maintained security policies and procedures for the company. Stayed abreast

of developments in Information Security to ensure stability of internal servers as well as

providing consultancy to clients. Acted as the Single Point Of Contact for the Systems

department, meeting with management daily to report on the status of the department and

discuss the company's requirements upon it. Managed a farm of over 30 Unix based servers

as a general Systems Administrator for the company and clients. Audited all client servers

prior to deployment into a live environment.

Trained with RIPE (www.ripe.net) to act as part of a Local Internet Registrar, with the

responsibility of assigning large IP blocks to customers.

April 1999 - June 2000: Hitachi Credit Plc

3-4 Wallbrook Business Centre

Hounslow

London, UK, TW4 6NW

IT Support Technician, Security Lead

Acted as the first point of contact for all computer-related problems both hardware and

software related. Lead security efforts on Network, Server, and workstation fronts.

Maintained router security between 3 corporate sites over a private WAN, monitored and

maintained the IDS. Frequently communicated with and worked with major ISP's to trace

security threats.

January 1996 - December 1998: UKChat Ltd

2 Bedser Close

London, UK, SE11 5BE

Security Officer, Producer, UK Computing Forum.

Responsibilities included managing a Microsoft Chat Server on a technical level, managing

email accounts, writing new articles for UKChat's Website. Also installed and configured

Windows NT4.0 Server and Workstation. Maintained these along with a small LAN running MS

Exchange 5.5. Provided 1st and 2nd line support to all end users including the general

public on problems with their systems, programs, networks and Internet connectivity and

mostly, network security. Dealt with all matters on computer and Internet security.

Personal Interests:

I enjoy reading literature, listening to music from around the world. I take a keen

interest in new technologies and keep myself apprised of new problems and solutions in the

IT industry.

Personal Details:

Name: Avleen Vig

Email: ******@************.***

References available upon request

Contact this candidate