Administrator System

Robin PowellAutomation Specialist & Senior UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator

********@**************.***

San Francisco, CA, USA

BEGIN Update: 21 Mar 2011

I AM ONLY INTERESTED IN WORK FROM HOME/TELECOMMUTE POSITIONS AT THIS TIME.

If you try to hire me for anything else, I will quote you a very high rate indeed.

END Update: 21 Mar 2011

If you are a hiring manager, you may get more value out of my

free-form resume.

Objectives

I am a UNIX System Administrator, and have been for my entire adult

life; about 15 years now. I am looking for exceptional

opportunities to help companies with excellent value propositions

make lots of money. I am especially interested in the challenge of

building a company's infrastructure from the ground up (in other

words, working for an early stage startup).

I live in San Francisco, CA, USA, and have no interest whatsoever in

relocation.

Abilities

I am a very fast learner, and a very fast worker. I also excel at

complicated trouble-shooting. Please don't take my word for it;

give me a working interview. Make me configure Apache from scratch

or debug a machine with a one character error in a config file or

something. Just make sure the machine has man pages, because I'm

offering you speed and skill, not an encyclopedic memory.

In terms of particular facets of systems administration I'm

interested in, I enjoy security related work, performance tuning,

and large scale automation. I've also spent time off and on being a

de facto DBA, and have enjoyed it immensely.

Skills

Each list is (more or less) priority ordered: the closer to the

beginning of the list, the more recent and thorough my skill is with

that thing.Networking: TCP/IP, DNS, NFS, SMTP, DHCP, Samba,

NNTP, Ethernet networking, routing

Software Administration:

Apache,

MySQL,

cfengine, puppet,

E-Mail ( Sendmail, exim, a bit of postfix),

PostgreSQL,

Request Tracker,

Subversion, RCS, CVS,

samba

Hardware Administration:

x86 machines (32 and 64 bit),

Sun Solaris machines,

NetApp filers

Markup Languages/Web Authoring:

HTML, XHTML, CSS, CGI (Perl, PHP, others), LaTeX

Protocols: TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, PXE booting, DHCP

Operating Systems: Linux (especially Debian),

Windows 2000/XP,

Solaris, SunOS,

NetBSD, FreeBSD

Security: SSH, SSL,

logchecker,

disaster recovery,

post-incident forensics,

chkrootkit,

PGP, GPG

Programming Languages:

UNIX shell scripting,

cfengine, puppet,

Lisp/Scheme,

SQL,

Perl, PHP, C

I am able to perform well under pressure. I have excellent

written and oral communication skills.Work Experience

May 2009 - Present

Senior UNIX Administrator

I don't usually talk about where I'm currently working unless I'm

looking, and I'm not, so I'm not going to bother filling this in

right now.

December 2004 - March 2009

Senior UNIX Administrator

Job Description

I was a member of the Production Operations team, which is

responsible for all customer-facing computer systems. I was

personally responsible for all of the machines that run www.furl.net

(about 50 machines of about six functional types, in terms of

software) and a few medium sized web search engine clusters (between

10 and 100 machines, depending on the cluster). All of them are

running Debian Linux on x86 hardware, mostly AMD, and mostly 64-bit

capable. A fair complement are now running Debian amd64, something

I helped drive forward.

Duties And Responsibilities

Maintenance of the www.furl.net infrastructure and several

of our back-end search server pools. I have basically

single-handedly turned Furl from something that kept oncall

awake 2 or 3 times a week to something that never causes any

trouble at all. This included extensive MySQL

server optimization, query optimization, capacity planning,

server buildouts, and various kinds of scripting, including

via cfengine.

Imaging and deployment of new machines as necessary,

including appropriate DNS modifications and adding servers

to our centralized management pool.

I have been almost entirely responsible for the suite of

scripts that turn a machine from a freshly imaged bare

Debian box into a complete server ready to fill a particular

role. I have configured something on the order of 6

different classes of servers to immediately fix themselves

in this fashion upon first bootup, based on the name of the

server. Much of this is done via cfengine rules; the rest

is shell scripting.

LookSmart manages something on the order of 800 machines

via cfengine. While I was not the person who originally

configured cfengine, I am responsible for a great deal of

the current cfengine scripts, and am acknowledged as the

secondary expert on the topic here.

Deployment of new software from our development group to our

various servers with a minimum of user-visible downtime

(normally we manage to achieve none at all).

Sharing in the on-call rotation; carrying a pager.

Working with development to test and debug production

outages and issues.

August 2002 - December 2004

Senior UNIX Administrator

Please note that Symantec bought Recourse, so I never actually left

my job at Recourse at all. I was moved from the former Recourse

offices in Redwood City to Symantec headquarters in Cupertino.

Job Description

I was a member of the corporate IT team, which had a total of about

12 members. My particular group had 8 members when I left, one of

whom is the primary admin for our mail and DNS infrastructure (he

predates my joining the company), and it is this person that I

worked most closely with.

I was the secondary admin for the corporate wide e-mail

infrastructure (at least on the UNIX side; Lotus Notes is the only

allowed mail client, so there are a lot of Notes servers on Windows

boxes), as well as the DNS infrastructure and a lot of

miscellaneous machine (more than 50).

Duties And Responsibilities

Being the primary admin for any new RedHat servers (the

installation of RedHat servers being a new initiative here).

Dealing with most DNS change requests. This includes

managing F5 3DNS and BigIP machines.

Dealing with the ListServ servers, which handle some

very large mailing lists (I've seen a flat file for the

subscriptions to a list be larger than 35MB).

Being part of the on-call rotation, which can get very

hectic. One call I was on lasted 15 hours.

Formulating purchasing requests for new hardware.

Installation and upgrading of Solaris and Linux servers,

both at the operating system and application level.

Management of the corporate IPlanet/Sun ONE web servers.

September 2000 - August 2002

Senior UNIX Administrator

Job Description

I was the sole company-wide UNIX administrator in a company of about

150 employees, about half of which are engineers on Linux boxes.

Duties And Responsibilities:

Many day-to-day problem solving and user assistance activities,

such as Solaris and RedHat troubleshooting, setting up

out-of-office messages, e-mail troubleshooting and the like.

Installation of Solaris x86 on Dell machines that Solaris really

wasn't designed for and is not certified on, and then making

images of those machines for quick shipment to customers of

working Solaris x86 boxes. Once built 44 such machines in a

day.

Planned and deployed a new ticketing system for the IT

department, using RT:

Request Tracker.

Maintained a RedHat Linux file server, which used Samba to serve

files to mostly Windows 2000 clients. Retired said server and

replaced it with a Maxtor

MaxAttach 4300, running Windows 2000. Now administering

that machine.

New computer setup, currently RedHat 7.2 on Dell machines.

Testing computer configurations. Everything from RedHat 7.2 to

Solaris x86 2.6 on a Sun Ultra 2 to Solaris 8 on a Sun E-450.

Computer trouble shooting, both preemptive and reactive.System administration in a mixed Solaris/Linux environment.NIS, NFS, routing and DNS administration. Sendmail configuration, including mail virus protection.Internal Netscape server administration.Unix tools installation and configuration.User and group administration.

March 2000 - September 2000

System Administrator

Job Description

I was a salaried, full-time employee of Taos. They then contracted me

out to their clients as a consultant. Due to the nature of this

arrangement, I got paid for overtime. Several of the job descriptions

below are for clients of Taos.

May 2000 - September 2000

Harmonic Inc. (for Taos)

System Administrator

Duties And Responsibilities:Computer trouble shooting, both preemptive and reactive.Informal UNIX training of PC and Oracle administrators. System administration in a Solaris environment.Firewall-1 configuration.NIS, NFS, routing and DNS administration. Sendmail configuration, including mail virus protection.Internal Netscape server administration.Unix tools installation and configuration.User and group administration.

March - April 2000

Photronics Inc. (for Taos)

System Administrator

Duties And Responsibilities:Computer trouble shooting, both preemptive and reactive.System administration in a Solaris environment.NIS, NFS and DNS administration. Alexandria backup software management. Unix tools installation and configuration.User and group administration.

Prior to 2000

Prior to March of 2000 I lived in Canada, and held various System

Administrator, DBA, and programming positions going back to early

1995. My first position formally listed as systems administation

started in 1998. More detailed information about this time period

is available upon request.Personal Programming Projects

I've written a

client for

called .

I've made a multilingual

patch for the mooix MOO server, which so far as I'm aware turns

it into the first fully multilingual MUD ever.

Systems Administration Writeups

I have a method of personal data

backup that seems to be fairly novel, in that it has all

of the following properties: I back up multiple OSes on

multiple machines, I synchronize it offsite, the offsite

backup is encrypted, I don't have to synch everything every

time I backup (which is daily, by the way) and it's free

(except for the accounts).

I've written a document on something that has been

(look for "Can I `apt-get arch-upgrade` from an already

installed i386 debian which is always fun. I've written

up how to .

This is very much not for the faint of heart.

Other Experience

June 2001 - Present,

a 501(c)(3) non-profit company

Web Administrator, Secretary,

And Treasurer

Duties And Responsibilities:

I provide both the server and network connection for the lojban.org

infrastructure, at my own expense. Also, I support a wide complex of

tools for a variety of projects. The lojban.org infrastructure

currently includes:

An Apache web server

environment, running, which is written

in PHP, is locally hacked by me, and uses MySQL on the back

end.

(RT) is used for user request tracking, although most actual

work gets done due to IRC and mailing list requests as I am

in practice the only admin. TikiWiki has the ability to

synchronize a mailing list and a web-based forum; this

ability was broken when I found it, but I fixed it and now

use it extensively. Also, I was able to get a fairly

massive performance increase by studying its SQL behavior

and removing an unnecessary query.

A home-brewed

multi-lingual dictionary editing system written in Perl

using,

with as

a back-end. I wrote about half of it (I took it over after

the original author got too busy, and it was very much not

finished at the time). The dictionary editing system fully

supports UTF-8 input, as does many of the rest of the

lojban.org systems. It even includes a -based

search tool (which was not written by me).

A quite a few mailing

lists, all of which are handled by Ecartis over an Exim

mail server. Most of them are using

MHonArc.

A public CVS server, used for group text editing of translation files,

and a public Subversion server used for a few programming projects.

The world's only fully multilingual . Thanks to

my programming efforts on the core, commands and

descriptions of all kinds can be entered in any language.

The actual

Lojban MOO allows full use of all features in both

Lojban and English.

A wide variety of miscellaneous services (SSH, DNS,

IceCast, MySQL, etc).

Jan-April 1998

System Administrator

Duties And Responsibilities:Handling user requests that involved system administration.Keeping the machines stable and other routine system

administration tasks.Keeping the members of the club happy with the computing

facilities we provided.Education And CertificationsSolaris 7 System Administration I

As an example of my technical background and learning speed: I

completed the online course for this certification in about 10

hours. 2 months later, I reviewed for about 4 hours, completed

the 2 hour exam in 50 minutes, and got 84%.

Bachelor Of MathematicsI was awarded a Bachelor Of Mathematics by the University of

Waterloo in 2002, having begun the program in 1994. It took

that long because in 1998 I went to work full time, and finished

my remaining courses slowly by correspondance.Other

References available upon request.

Contact this candidate