D o u g l a s
Unix Administrator / Systems Engineer
Specializing in Open Source Infrastructure
Open to relocation and/or remote telecommuting work
Palo Alto, CA, 94303
Cell: (805) 340-5627 • Updated: Mon Jul 25, 2011
* Not a Canadian Citizen *
Please do not contact me regarding work with social media, photo sharing, advertising, marketing, open floor-plan environments crammed with cheap Ikea furniture, or contract positions.
Goals
To architect, design, build, implement and deploy feature-rich solutions and applications open source technologies. Push all expectations, both personal and industry-wide, of the solutions that open source solutions can provide. Grow and learn new personal and professional skills in the process. Establish myself as a valuable member of a team in, a company, that I feel a strong sense of commitment to and who's products and services I believe in.
Strengths
I have a solid foundation in information technology with over 15 years of experience. I have an ability to adapt and learn new technologies quickly, and am able to investigate and prototype new technologies and provide benefits and risks. I have a unique perspective of having grown up in another English speaking western country (Australia). I possess good problem solving skills and root cause analysis. I am an excellent communicator with an attention to detail. Ultimately I am looking for a career with a company who's purpose I believe in, not just a job.
Skill Summary
Operating Systems Applications Networking Development Operations Concepts
CentOS Redhat Puppet Nagios/NRPE iptables PXE booting Python Perl Change management
Gentoo Fedora Munin Cacti ngrep tcpdump SQL sh/ksh Revision control
Mandrake SLS JBoss Tomcat DHCP bonding Tcl/Tk Expect Configuration management
Slackware Debian MySQL Oracle FTP DNS HTML RPM Builds Trouble shooting
Mac OS X Solaris Trac Subversion POP SMTP Regexes System/Network monitoring
FreeBSD Kickstart Cobbler ssh TCP/UDP Client/Server Trending
VMWare Xen TFTP Stunnel Systems automation
OpenVZ Splunk Application deployment
Apache Syslog-ng Reproducability
Voice-Over-IP OpenLDAP OpenVPN Documentation
PCI-DSS
SIP RTP Duplicity Gnupg On call 24/7
AGI/FastAGI Asterisk MCollective
DUNDi DID
ENUM DNS SRV
IAX G711/G729
OpenSER Polycom
Dial plans Carriers
CLEC T1
VxML Mediant
(continued next page)
Certification and Training
Oracle:
04/2011: Oracle 11g Enterprise Architecture and Administration, UCSC Extension.
Puppet:
10/2009: Puppet Camp.
Digium:
09/2006: Asterisk Bootcamp
09/2006: Certification: Digium Certified Asterisk Professional (dCAP)
SNIA (Storage Industry Networking Association):
04/2006: SNIA Fundamentals
04/2006: SNIA Certified Professional(SCP)
Sun Microsystems:
03/2002: Certification: Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 2.8
04/2002: Certification: Sun Certified Network Administrator for Solaris 2.8
Veritas:
12/2001: Veritas Foundation Suite.
Education
Bachelor of Business, Computing and Information Management
University of Western Sydney, 1991 -- 1994
Professional Experience
Sep 2009 - Linux Systems Administrator
present Livegamer/Twofish, Palo Alto, CA
Live Gamer provides micro transactions for the interactive entertainment industry.
Purpose: My role at Live Gamer is to perform any and all technical operations duties that are required to keep the Live Gamer service up and running.
Achievements:
• Built from the ground up, the automated process for the deployment of Live Gamer systems and software. This involved the use of subversion for all revision control, puppet for centralized configuration management, Cobbler and Kickstart for deployment, and custom built RPM's for package management.
• Currently configuring services to replicate data to the disaster recovery data centre in puppet. This includes OpenLDAP master/slave configuration, primary/secondary DNS and SVN replication.
• With above procedure, implemented ability fully configure software component of a bare server in about 10 minutes.
• Built puppet modules for every conceivable software component installed on servers, including, but not limited to apache, cacti, cobbler, Dell hardware utilities, dhcp, duplicity, iptables, jboss, tomcat, ldap, mysql, nagios, memcached, named, ntp, openvpn, pentaho, snmp, trac, tripwire, vnc, xen, yum and so on.
• Implemented PXE boot and Kickstart install of server systems with Cobbler and puppet.
• Performed software upgrades to customer instances running JBoss and Tomcat using aforementioned deployment process.
• Implemented a secure centralized logging system with syslog-ng and reverse ssh tunnels.
• Maintained DNS, cacti, Nagios and responded to 24x7 alerts.
• Management of the collocation facilities including the racking and stacking servers.
• Assisted with the implementation of PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry) security certification.
• (more to come)
Jun 2007 - Senior Systems Engineer
Sep 2009 Project Goth/Mig33, Burlingame, CA
Mig33 is a global online social networking community with over 24 million registered users that supports international voice calling, chat rooms, profiles, photo sharing, mobile web and instant message integration with MSN, Yahoo, Googletalk and others.
Purpose: To be the subject matter expert on Voice Over IP issues related to Mig33's international call back service. Split responsibility between design/development and technical operations.
Achievements:
Engineering:
• Designed and implemented a system to deposit detailed call records into MySQL from real-time SIP messaging. Call records contained the final SIP response code, post dial delay, ring back duration, ASR, ACD, and APDD.
• Design of new features that would improve carrier ASR's, using a combination of least cost routing, failover, selection of SBC with highest ASR to specific destination, selection of SBC with highest overall ASR, selection of closest SBC based on latitude and longitude coordinates (haversine formula). All performed live with Asterisk and OpenSER.
• Implemented inbound DID(direct inward dial) for an IVR with round robin load balancing and site-to-site failover.
• Built user interfaces under JBOSS with java servlets to maintain various voice configuration such as voice routing, service restarts, ASR reports.
• Maintained and updated the code on the company's JBOSS MIS system as necessary.
• Write custom python scripts to parse and report on 120Gb of unindexed, compressed chat log message files.
• Built Nagios plugins in python to monitor and alert on system availability and metrics.
• Built Cacti plugins in python to graph voice network metrics.
• Write ad-hoc scripts in python to perform various utility tasks.
Technical Operations:
• Member of a technical operations team with locations in three different time zones, Burlingame, Kuala Lumpur and Australia.
• On 24/7 call one week in every two.
• Construction and implementation of change control documents for system updates, utilising trac, puppet and subversion branching and merging.
• Performed operations systems configuration management with a combination of subversion (for revision control) and puppet (for centralised configuration management).
• Packaging of various software applications into RPM's for production release.
• Provisioned and integration tested new SIP and H323 internet telephony service providers.
• Worked with various ITSP's and DID providers, such as Verizon and Voxbone when provisioning new service and debugging international call issues.
• Project managed technical operations projects with the open source wiki Trac(later Confluence)
• Performed FMECA (Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis) of production hardware systems.
• Wrote operations procedures for various tasks such as disk replacements, orderly shut downs.
• Debug operations alerts for problems like delayed MySQL replication, DOS attacks, application crashes etc.
Sep 2005 - VoIP Applications Convergence Engineer
May 2007 OneEighty Communications, Billings, MT
OneEighty is a competitive local exchange carrier providing facilities-based telecommunications solutions in Montana and Wyoming. OneEighty was acquired by Eschelon Telecom of Minneapolis in October 2006. Eschelon Telecom was further acquired by Integra Telecom in 2008.
Purpose: My responsibility was to personally implement, with minimal direction, a hosted IP telephony product for a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier(CLEC) (ie a telephone company) from conception to product release, and beyond. Critical requirements that I personally implemented for this system included carrier class system redundancy, scalability, and a myriad of business related, telephony feature sets, for customers. Redundancy was a fundamental requirement of the product. As a result, I architected the ability of the system as a whole to undergo single or multiple component failures virtually anywhere, with little or no impact on customers. Scalability was also a requirement. I designed the system such that new nodes could be added to increase concurrent call processing capacity. This new product was designed to work in conjunction with One Eighty's Lucent 5ESS switch, eventually replacing it as One Eighty moved to a soft switched environment.
Achievements:
• During initial evaluation, performed extensive research into the use of various soft-switching software as potential platforms for the new hosted IP telephony product, including those of Sylantro, Communigate, PingTel, Digium's Asterisk, and IPTel's SER (SIP Express Router). Engaged with product management in detailed discussion regarding the advantages, disadvantages and ability of each platform to meet requirements.
• Designed, built and programmed the SIP proxy components of the IP telephony product, using the OpenSER SIP Express Router.
• Designed, built and programmed the PBX components of the IP telephony product, using the Asterisk open source PBX. The PBX components added the extensive feature sets required by One Eighty's business (not residential) customers.
• Configured the PSTN gateways, Audiocodes Mediant Gateways.
• Applied high availability and redundancy protocols to the relationships between all functional components in the architecture. This insured single or multiple components in the system could fail with little or no impact on the ability of customers place calls.
• Ordered, racked and installed the IP telephony product application servers. Installed Gentoo Linux on all servers, and all necessary utilities and applications. Performed constant tweaking and modifications to operating systems and software to suit requirements.
• Designed, built, and programmed the auxiliary hosted IP telephony services, including DHCP, DNS, FTP and SNTP.
• Provisioned, with little assistance, customer premises hand sets, the Polycom Sound Point 501, Sound Point 601, and Sound Station 4000 telephones. This included extensive configuration of the very large XML configuration files.
• Directed a team of consultants in the design of a custom MySQL database schema to be used as the core for all advanced call routing feature sets.
• Developed an Asterisk AGI python dial plan application that was the 'brains' for all call routing. It queried a MySQL database in real time and controlled all call flow. Features controlled by the AGI application included calling blacklists and white-lists for incoming and outgoing calls, feature access, findme/followme, PIC codes and rate centers, various levels of caller ID, casual dialing, star code enabled features, paging and intercom modes, and more.
• Wrote custom utility and 'glue' scripts in perl, python and other scripting languages as necessary to aid in the construction of the hosted IP telephony product.
• Integrated the Asterisk Voicemail system and Asterisk ACD queue functions with the customer premises Polycom handsets for ease of use. This allowed one-touch voicemail retrieval, and one-touch ACD agent logins. Configured and modified the Asterisk Voicemail system as required.
• Configured Sipura Analog Telephone Adapters (ATA's) to allow PSTN-to-IP and IP-to-PSTN call routing. Configured the Asterisk PBX dial plan to accommodate the ATA's.
• Worked with members of the operations team, and regularly discussed matters of security for the IP telephony product.
• Wrote extensive documentation for the ongoing maintenance of the system.
• Performed regular trouble-shooting, and diagnosis of problems as they arose with the new product. Regularly used tools such as ethereal, ngrep, and syslog in problem diagnosis. Performed extensive debugging SIP traffic between systems components.
Nov 2000 - Unix (Solaris/Linux) System Administrator / Integration Engineer
Sep 2005 Troika Networks, Westlake Village, CA
Troika Networks, acquired by Qlogic in 2005, designs and builds fibre-channel SAN(storage area networking) appliances that slot into a fibre-channel network and allow the virtualization and management of physical storage.
Achievements:
• Performed SAN interoperability and integration testing in a complex, non-heterogeneous, multi-vendor, SAN environment.
• Integrated various vendor LVM/HA/DMP software products as needed under various operating systems with the Troika Accelera SAN appliance.
• Developed test automation tools in Perl and Python to test LVM/HA/DMP products.
• Developed and documented an object-oriented test automation API in Perl and Python to test a complex SAN environment, and control various SAN devices such as switches, power sentries, user interfaces, proprietary appliances, storage arrays and host operating systems. Operating systems included Linux, Solaris, VMWare ESX, Windows, HP/UX, AIX and Tru64.
• Managed various storage arrays to allocate storage, and other SAN infrastructure devices such as switches as needed.
• Automated and standardized the installation of Sun test systems with Solaris Custom Jumpstart, and Linux systems with Red Hat Kickstart.
• Performed QA testing and troubleshooting of in-house built (Troika Zentai) fibre-channel HBA's, and SAN appliances (Troika Accelera) running Linux.
• Made operating system modifications as needed to achieve correct or optimum configurations in a SAN environment, such as modifying and recompiling Linux kernels.
• Performed Sun Solaris administration and provided Sun support to multiple departments.
• Provided support in a quality assurance and development environments for various Sun hardware platforms.
• Built various utilities with Perl, Java and raw HTML to assist in the allocation of Sun test systems.
• Worked with software engineers in a highly iterative manner to debug and diagnose software and firmware problems.
• Worked with external vendors to debug problems.
• Tracked issues and maintained accountability until problem resolution.
Dec 1999 - Perl Web Developer(Contract)
Aug 2000 News Corporation, Sydney, Australia
Rupert Murdocks News Corporation is the parent company of Fox, and various other media subsidiaries.
Achievements:
• Creation of automatic Oracle data loading systems.
• Developed a series of tools to take television programming data from approximately 35 different television channels for upload into to Oracle.
• Developed tools to convert online media content to XML for distribution via SMS to cell phones.
• Wrote technical development specifications for various projects.
• Constructed list manager software.
Aug 1998 - Voice-Over-IP Operations Tech Leader
Nov 1999 OzEmail Interline, Sydney, Australia
OzEmail Interline, later Interline Networks (acquired by ITXC, then Teleglobe, VSNL and finally Tata), was an early pioneer in the Voice-Over-IP arena. They built a world wide Voice-Over-IP infrastructure with a whole sale model, by selling custom built gateways to resellers and acting as a bridge between the public internet and the local PSTN. They had over 250 gateways operating in 15 countries. Interline was a subsidiary of OzEmail, the largest Internet service provider in Australia at the time.
Achievements:
• Developed monitoring tools in Perl, ksh, sed, expect and SQL.
• Provision of real-time Voice-Over-IP capacity planning raw data and graphs.
• Collection of real-time Voice-Over-IP call quality metrics raw data and graphs.
• Operating System monitoring of the Sun hardware controllers situated in Sydney, Los Angeles and San Jose. Data sent back to a central server in Sydney via a TCP/IP client/server mechanism.
• Voice-Over-IP node/gateway operating system and application monitoring via a custom written TCP/IP server application interfaced to via a web page.
• Provided initial training and ongoing technical assistance for new staff members.
• Installed, configured and maintained the company mail relay for the domain interline.aust.com.
• Performed Y2K upgrades to Voice-Over-IP equipment in San Jose, Los Angeles, and New York.
• Collection of ASR (average success rate) Voice-Over-IP call completion records to every telephone area code to every country in the world on an hour-by-hour basis. Development of web pages and email to display results, and highlight areas of concern.
• Creation of several monitoring machines running Linux to be used in typical Network Operations Centre style. Involved installation of Red Hat Linux, Apache web server, X11R6, secure shell etc.
• Creation of quick reference reports showing telephony routing for all areas every three hours.
Thank you.