August 2003 - Present
Global Professional Services, Red Hat Inc
Consultant

As a Red Hat Consultant, I am a part of the Global Professional Services organization, and am responsible for providing superior on-site support and expertise to Red Hat's most significant and most visible customers. I am tasked with assisting premier clients with all aspects of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment from core builds to infrastructure sizing to server and patch deployment methodologies to simple systems support. I am also responsible for ensuring complicated support cases are routed to the appropriate Red Hat Support group and that the responses are timely and thorough, acting as a liaison between the client and Red Hat Support.

Prior to this role, I was in a Technical Engineer I, a Team Lead, and a Technical Engineer II role for Production Support, responsible for handling cases of significant complexity and ensuring the most complex problems and most demanding customers received levels of service appropriate for a world-wide enterprise level support organization. As part of these roles, I was given the role of on-site supervisor for our then-outsourced level 1 group in Manila, Philippines. During this 3 ½ month assignment, I was the sole Red Hat representative on site, responsible for ensuring the technicians met or exceeded service expectations of customers, had appropriate knowledge and skills, and were aware of any changes in support levels or product features. I was additionally responsible for ensuring my expertise was shared with other technicians to enable the organization to handle a greater number of tickets on more complicated issues without having a single resource become a bottleneck. In addition to these team lead duties, I was responsible for handling technically complex issues relating to Linux / UNIX / Windows interconnectivity, Samba, LDAP, SSH, BIND (DNS), scripting and compiling of programs, and numerous other facets of the operating system. I maintained those skills by keeping an active hand in servicing customer issues at all levels of complexity, from single-system configuration file issues to multi-departmental interoperability and integration issues.

June 2000 - August 2003
Systems Administrator, North Carolina State University

As the Systems Administrator for the Mathematics Department, I was responsible for managing man maintaining a large network consisting of over 400 faculty, staff, and student lab machines which include Sun SPARC systems, Intel compatible PC's running both Windows NT and Red Hat Linux, and Macintosh computers running MacOS 9 and MacOS X. I was also responsible for the servers within the mathematics department, which include a Sun AFS fileserver, a Sun print server, a Sun dialup server, a Macintosh print server, and a Linux Beowulf compute server.

I was also responsible for ensuring that the computing environment within the department was compatible and interoperable with the campus standard computing environment as well as compatible with University and College level computing regulations and goals. This included ensuring proper integration of workstations with the campus Hesiod and DNS services, ensuring new purchases were compatible with supported operating systems and that those operating systems were installed on new machines, and that user logins were functional across all campus systems by using the campus-wide Kerberos authentication facilities.

I was also in part responsible for development of useful applications for the campus environment in both the Windows and UNIX environments; the Windows environment used Novell's Zen 2 environment to distribute applications to workstations through the Novell Applications Launcher, and I was responsible for maintaining the portion of the NDS that pertains directly to the Mathematics department.

On the UNIX side, I was responsible for installing some applications into AFS space for use on campus, and co-developed a ``Realm Kit Application Launcher'' for the Realmkit for Red Hat Linux which presents an interface to Linux users similar to the Novell Application Launcher presented to Windows users. I am also the co-author of the Realm Kit for Red Hat Linux User's Guide.

September 1997 - June 2000
UNIX Administrator, BB&T Operations Center

As the lead engineer of the UNIX systems administration group, I was responsible for systems design and configuration through installation through maintenance. I was directly responsible for the administration of an HP V2250 and attached EMC Symmetrix 3830 storage subsystem, which were to be the backbone of an enterprise-wide branch automation project utilizing a 1+ TB Oracle database. I was partially responsible for several smaller HP systems including five (5) K-series machines and two (2) D series machines, as well as several Sun machines ranging from SPARCStation 5's through UltraEnterprise 2's up to a pair of Enterprise 3000 machines and IBM platforms ranging from an S7A down to several P43's. I was also responsible for developing and deploying a Solaris / Intel based lab environment using NIS+ namespaces.

While I was initially hired as a contractor and was assigned duties pertaining only to a single AIX-based project, I rapidly became a valuable asset to the bank for systems administration of all platforms, and was given various assignments involving cross-platform scripting and documentation, working mostly in Perl for the scripting and Microsoft Word for the documentation.

Due to employee turnover, I was eventually given responsibilities as the lead administrator on first Solaris systems, particularly the bank's Enterprise Backup System utilizing Legato Networker, and later on HP-UX systems which included mission-critical Oracle databases housed on terabyte-plus fibre channel disk farms; the largest disk farm was composed of five (5) HP FC-30 arrays, with the second largest being the above mentioned EMC Symmetrix 3830. I was responsible for ongoing maintenance and monitoring of both of these disk farms, and was also responsible for ensuring that they had the proper configuration parameters and tuning options for optimal Oracle performance.

May 1997 - September 1997
LAN Administrator, Regional Operations Center, Syntel Inc.

As the junior member of a three-person team responsible for the administration and upkeep of a 400-plus node LAN, I was primarily responsible for resolution of user trouble calls and maintenance of fileserver space. Additionally, I was responsible for assisting in ensuring the interconnection to the corporate headquarters was intact and available and for working with the Help Desk in establishing support levels and policies.

June 1996 - May 1997
UNIX Systems Administrator, ATM Facility, Lockheed-Martin Federal Systems

As a junior administrator, I was assigned duties related to the care and feeding of two large labs, each of which were 60-plus nodes. The first lab was a development and unit test lab, which also housed the primary build machine for the project I was assigned to. It included approximately 60 IBM AIX systems for testing purposes, all of which were on a private, disconnected token ring network. My duties involved troubleshooting hardware issues on the test machines and project build servers, ensuring a stable networking environment in the lab, and ensuring proper network configuration on the build machines, which were connected to both the corporate LAN and the test lab network.

The second lab I was responsible for was an end-to-end test facility with approximately the same number of test machines, many with additional peripheral equipment necessary for testing purposes. In addition, I was responsible for insuring backups were taken on a regular basis of all the build and code repository servers and for verifying those backups in case they were needed.

Finally, I developed a small Tcl/Tk script that would scan the lab networks to determine a very basic health reading of the machines in the lab using the ``ping'' functionality and a red/green GUI indicator to give the user a relatively quick overview of the lab's state.

Prior to June 1996

Prior to June 1996, I was a full-time student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I held several part time systems administration assistant positions while a student, which gave me exposure to the world of Systems Administration in general, and I decided I liked it, so I went into that field after graduation.