Management Software

Tobias Weingartner

Senior Systems Wrangler

Web: http://tepid.org/toby/

EMail: abpvpt@r.postjobfree.com

Phone: +1-780-***-****

Profile

Driven and curious personality combined with a desire to learn,

improve, and change things for the better in whatever I do, I am

looking for the next challenge in my life. I enjoy solving problems

and have spent most of my career solving technical problems. Over the

past five years, I have spent an increasing amount of time mentoring

junior people as well as solving architectural, logistical and

cultural problems ingrained within larger team environments.

I am looking for a senior technical position with the opportunity

to mentor and/or inspire junior people to solve large problems. My

extensive experience on the technical, managerial, and logistical

side will make me a valuable asset to any company looking for an

experienced senior technical team member or technical team lead.

Education

PhD, Electrical Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, AB, Canada -- ongoingMSc, Computing Science, University of Alberta, AB, Canada -- 2003BSc Spec., Computer Science/Math, Brandon University, MB, Canada -- 1997

I speak, read, and write German and English fluently.

5 - expert,

4 - senior,

3 - competent,

2 - basic,

1 - familiar

Experience

Infrastructure CoordinatorUniversity of Alberta

2008-2012

This position, consisting of both planning and supervisory duties,

took place in a department consisting of roughly 60 research staff,

30 support staff, 200 graduate students, and roughly 1500 undergraduate

students. The infrastructure consisted of a very diverse set of

machines and operating systems encompassing 30TB+ of data, 1500+

computers, 10GbE core network, multiple routing domains, as well

as mail, web services, Oracle/MySQL databases, multiple redundant

firewalls, and a multitude of other systems.

Planning duties comprised of drawing up plans and documents to

determine future directions and initiatives for department

infrastructure and presenting and promoting these to the department

executive. Infrastructure plans included tracking and managing of

the $400000 capital budget. Further responsibilities included

managing the time and tasks of four people with respect to various

infrastructure projects. This required liaising with development,

hardware, and other groups within the university on a regular basis.

Senior Unix Systems AdministratorUniversity of Alberta

2001-2008

During this time I moved into a more senior role within the group and the

department. Initially I trained one staff member to be able to take over

most of

the day to day management and administration of the backup system. I was

point technical lead on the planning and implementation of an IBM S/390

mainframe as a departmental file server. After deployment, I was the

person primarily responsible for the performance tuning of the S/390.

After this project, I ended up supervising one full time staff position,

as well as one part time student internship position. These supervisions

included task assignment, task review, as well as other day to day management

and mentoring of the people in these positions. As a senior member of the

department technical groups, I initiated the first inter-group talks,

followed by participation in committee and implementation phases for

integrated department wide backup, firewall and network changes, as well

as more integrated technical administration.

During the tail end of this period, I was seconded for 50%, increasing to

90%, of my time to the SSG group. This was both a test for seeing how two

separate IT groups within the department could be integrated, as well as

to help out an overworked IT group within the department. During this

time, I planned and implemented the wild-west network subnet,

was part of the department email migration from zmailer to postfix, was

part of the ldap project, and wrote and deployed a new moodle authentication

method for the department course moodle site. As part of my secondment, I

used a portion of my time to help cleanup a significant portion of outstanding

request tickets, eventually resolving in excess of 200 open tickets.

Unfortunately, the department website was hacked during the later part of

2008, at which point I was the lead person on the investigation and planning

and implementation of the recovery procedures that the SSG group ended up

implementing.

Subsequently moved into the beginning of a management role, supervising two

positions, still primarily responsible for the laboratory infrastructure.

Supervision mainly consisted of time and project management relating to

infrastructure systems.

Unix Systems AdministratorUniversity of Alberta

1998-2001

Unix Systems Administrator primarily responsible for laboratory

environments and infrastructure pertaining to same. Infrastructure

included an Oracle teaching database, a dozen authentication servers,

Unix and Windows file services, web and mail services, as well as

a few custom labs for robotics, video processing, and FPGA programming.

The lab environment consisted of roughly 200 graduate students, 1500

undergraduate students, and a variety of lab environments.

Senior Build/Release EngineerWolfram Research

1998-1999

Primary responsibility was porting Mathematica to all the Unix

platforms, as well as building test and release candidates of all

their Unix based software. Primarily responsible for tracking down

platform, compiler, and operating system specific bugs within the

Mathematica software and fixing them. Was also a general sounding

board for portable programming practices. Two main projects that

were implemented was the automation of the XFE (X front end) build

on 7 different platforms. The other project was the implementation

of a company-wide source code management system, such that it was

easier to track changes to the source code.

Unix Systems AdministratorETH Zuerich, Switzerland

1992-1993

Administered between 450 and 500 computers. Operating systems in use

were: SunOs 4.1.3, Solaris 2.x, Dynix, MacOS, MS-DOS, OSF/1, Ultrix,

and others. Hardware ranged from PC's, Mac's, Sun's

including Sun 690's, 490's, 390's, Sequent's, and a spattering of

many other type of servers. Additional duties involved advising

faculty in the purchase of software and hardware. Made recommendations

on operating procedures involving computers and software. In our

"spare" time, we wrote software to automate the management of our

hardware and software stack, aid in monitoring of systems, security,

disk usage, performance, etc. Other software written was for the

creation of accounts, installation of software, and many other tasks.

Novell Systems ProgrammerBrandon University, MB

1996-1998

Worked for computer services on campus. Various duties, such as

pulling coax and fiber for our network and new campus backbone.

Wrote a new printer management system for the Novell server on

campus. (Alpha & Beta code finished). Assisted in first student NT

network installation.

Student Assistant ProgrammerBrandon University, MB

1994-1995

Worked for computer services and library services on campus.

Responsibilities involved writing various programs for the library. All

programs were written on VAX computers, running VMS 5.2. Also,

wrote a symbiont for VMS 5.2, which drove the campus HP LJ4's printers

over ethernet, implementing printer accounting. Set up and

maintained first local sun workstation, running Solaris 2.3.

VMS OperatorBrandon University, MB

1992-1992

Responsible for backup, managing print queues, and other duties

as assigned. I was hired as a replacement for the local operator

who was on sick leave at the time.

Summer Student HelpHamiota, School Division #38, MB

1991-1991

Set up and installed computers throughout the school division. In

total, I set up close to 60 computers that summer. Systems included

Commodore 64's, Apple II's, PC's, etc.

Computer InstructorHamiota, MB

1990-1990

Taught an introductory computer course for farmers. Topics covered

included MS-DOS, word processing, spreadsheets, and databases.

Software covered included things like WordPerfect, Lotus-123, and

FoxPro. I learned that I love to teach. I also learned that

you need to teach at the level of your pupils, not the level the

teacher is at.

Hobbies

OpenBSD Kernel/System Contributor

OpenBSD code contributor since July 1996 with main focus on low-level

i386/amd64 kernel and boot code. One of the longest contributing members.

Have been part of the release process since the OpenBSD version 2.1 days.

While my main focus is low-level hardware-software interfaces, I have

contributed all over the tree, including web, ports, and user-land libraries

and programs.

I am not active presently, but keep in touch with the core group of

OpenBSD developers and find time to comment and/or review diffs being

proposed.

Martial Arts

I've been practicing Judo since 1992, with an absence from the sport

between 1998-2008. At the current time, I hold a blue belt, as well as

level 1 coaching certificates for Judo. I'm very happy that my previous

Sensei (Silvio Sboto), and my current Sensei allow me to help coach and

teach the beginners' classes.

Silver/Gold Smithing

The geek in me is always searching out new things to learn and try

out. To that end, I've been reading and experimenting with silver,

gold, and copper. I find that working in a physical medium

lets me express myself in ways that code and computers rarely do.

It is a refreshing reprise from the virtual and technical world

that I enjoy immensely. In the past, I've worked on Mokume Gane,

a rather challenging discipline which forges many layers of differing

metal together.

Some of my pieces are of acceptable quality and have been presented

as gifts to some of my friends and acquaintances. In the future, I'm

hoping to be able to work on bigger silver pieces in the traditional

Silversmithing techniques, using hammers and other methods to shape

and create pieces such as bowls, pitchers, and cups.

Computers/Programming

It s an addiction. I live and breathe computers day and night. Ever

since my indoctrination in grade school, I ve hacked, broken, fixed, and

generally courted more than 15 different makes of computers. It began

on a Commodore PET. My first self bought computer was a Commodore 128,

which I took apart to the circuit board level, being able to attach

extra modems and solder extra functionality onto the motherboard myself.

Since those early days, I ve had the pleasure of using hardware from the

minuscule, all the way up to a Cray-2.

In the past I've contributed to a number of projects, including

Athena/MIT X11, the LP-Mud compiler, as well as other projects.

One of the things I enjoy very much, when sufficient time exists to keep

the concentration necessary, is reverse engineering various things. One

of the biggest personal projects I've undertaken is the complete

reverse engineering of a Nissan 1990 300ZX-TT ECU. The whole reverse

engineering was done from dumping EEPROMs, to creating custom code to

de-compile, organize and comment assembly code, in order to understand

the various functions. This work helped me in tuning my own 1990 300ZX-TT

to 500+HP.

Currently, the bulk of this part of my life consists of creating

various scripts and small programs, usually to feed my drive for

continuous learning.

Various Miscellany

I tend to be a fairly active person. In the distant past I've

been known to play an accordian (and might still be able to play a

tune or two). I've owned and devoured an extensive collection of

books in both English and German, and as time allows, continue to

read in both languages. I've also been known to enjoy dancing,

and have taken 2-3 years worth of dance classes. Some of the

patterns have stuck enough for me to manage to lead a partner

through a variety of dances.

References

Tobias Weingartner.

Tobias Weingartner.

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