Apr / 2001 to Current
Full-Time Self Employed IT Consultant
For several years now, I’ve been working as a Linux consultant for all sizes of companies. Some of these duties include monitoring system design and deployment, system and database redundancy, firewall configuration, patch maintenance, operating system upgrades, VMWare design and management, general network administration, MySQL administration, load balancing for high traffic environments, mitigating Denial Of Service, and Dictionary attacks, performance monitoring, network storage, and security audits.
Jul/2012 to Current
Linux / Network Consultant
CountyLine BBQ, Inc
Austin, TX 78704
I provide Linux, and VMWare administration, network consultation, and technical backup for their MIS director. County Line maintains a mid-sized mail server and a very active Mailman (mailing list) server.
Jan/2020 to Jul/2020
LogicMonitor Certified Professional
Global Payments
Atlanta, GA 30328
Global Payments is a leading pure-play payments technology company delivering innovative software and services to its customers globally. Ten data centers spread across six nations, each hosting four stages of domains, Global Payments is genuinely a world-wide company.
As a LogicMonitor Certified Professional, I was contracted to expand an existing Logic Monitor deployment, from a minimal legacy installation, into a full corporate-wide solution. Including core and edge business units, as well as departments from the ongoing TSYS merger. Overall this included overseeing the deployment of over a dozen additional siloed domains, 13k on-site devices, and 10k cloud (AWS, Azure, and GCP) devices.
From the start, I was responsible for laying out the deployment plan and identifying bottlenecks in the roll-out. This included interfacing with department managers and edge business units to identify their needs in a monitoring solution. Recognizing the need for, and building custom DataSources for in-house software, and API scripting to batch implement uniform changes throughout their environment.
Jan/2017 to Nov/2019
Linux Consultant
Eastern Research Group
Austin, TX 78731
After a catastrophic failure of one of their research systems, I was asked to help them rebuild, and restore their environment. I implemented a VMWare ESXi hypervisor, hosting CentOS, and Ubuntu servers that allowed them to have a robust environment that was not dependent on hardware. Picking up and migrating these vital systems to different hardware can now be done with ease. Advancing forward, we implemented a proper and complete backup solution and early detection of hardware and OS failures.
Jul/2017 to Aug/2019
Senior Linux Consultant
Keller Williams
Austin, TX 78746
Keller Williams Realty, Inc. is the world’s largest real estate franchise by agent count and most abundant in the U.S. by units sold and sales volume, with associates across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. At the core of the KW infrastructure-paradigm is three Java environments (two versions of GlassFish, plus JBoss/WildFly), each with their own life cycle environments. A combination of Oracle, and MySQL database servers, clustered ActiveMQ servers, and large LDAP environments. Front-ending these environments was a combination of WAF (Incapsula, replaced with CloudFlare), Cisco ASA firewall, A10 Load Balancers, and Nginx web servers hosted in vSphere clusters, both locally and at a data center.
I spent most of my time at Keller Williams focused on supporting their Java environments, with two primary projects. My first goal was to stabilize the situation by converting all of the system monitoring from Zenoss to LogicMonitor. I was able to take an uptime rate of around 50% to the industry standard of 99.999%.
The last year I was there, I took on a massive security update initiative. Working directly for the Director of Information Security, I identified internal and external vulnerabilities in the environment. Then balancing the PEN testing results, I planned out and implemented their most substantial infrastructure security update in the company’s history. I initiated the project by replacing back-end supporting systems of ActiveMQ, LDAP, Solr, and MySQL. Leading to the end goal of upgrading end of life web servers, and Java Glassfish servers. Overall I planned with and coordinated Dev and QA teams to implement 15 years’ worth of security updates over the course of a year.
Sep/2016 to Jul/2017
Linux Consultant
KiddoEMR / Cedar Park Pediatrics
Cedar Park, TX 78613
I migrated Cedar Park Pediatrics outdated system, into a new geo-redundant environment. Implementing VMWare hypervisors in both their office and an out of state data center, allowed them to have the peace of mind that fully redundant environments provide. All data from their databases, to their document repository, were kept live and encrypted at both locations.
Along the way, I increased their IT security, migrated their existing database of patients, and helped them deal with the headaches of maintaining a custom software solution. When they determined that their Open Source project (KiddoEMR) was not up to the task moving forward, I automated the screen capture of over 5000 patients, and related documentation, into a PDF archive.
KiddoEMR was an open-sourced Electronic Medical Records initiative owned by Cedar Park Pediatrics. Unfortunately, they had been residing on an outdated release of Debian Linux, without redundancy. The project I laid out not only involved upgrading their existing environment, but also included virtualizing their production servers, and creating a sandboxed development environment for their programmers. Their production environment was migrated to two Geo-redundant locations, utilizing Percona’s Active-Active MySQL server. Both environments are always in a ready state, allowing them to use both servers in real-time, without the fear of losing data.
Jul/2013 to Apr/2017
Linux Consultant
T2 Technical Services
Wilton, CT 06897
T2 is a VAR for Nurse Call systems deployed in several prominent large nursing and hospital chains. One service they add is statistical analyses of patient interactions and monitoring. This required adapting HL7 streams from ASCOM, and Vocera systems to feed data back to one of two VMWare clusters in Geo-redundant data centers. All network connections were facilitated by either Cisco IPSEC VPN, OpenVPN, or a proprietary RaspberryPi data gateway I designed to handle asynchronous encrypted streaming. On occasion, we deployed virtual guests at the client sites, and facilitate both synchronous and asynchronous MySQL database replication between the client and the processing servers.
Feb/2010 to Jul/2015
Senior Linux Consultant
eGov Solutions
Knoxville, TN 37919
As a Linux consultant, I brought stability and redundancy to an environment spread across the state of Tennessee. From the centralized servers in Knoxville to county seats in over a dozen locations, reliability was the primary focus. In an environment that, at peak times, can see millions of dollars worth of transactions per day, downtime is not an option. I built a robust ecosystem by leveraging VMware Hypervisors, Debian Linux, a custom LAMP stack, and VPN networks, all configured for extreme performance.
Oct/2011 to Jan/2013
Senior Linux Consultant
Myriad Development
Austin, TX 78746
I migrated their existing environment from Solaris Sparc to new CentOS web servers and an Oracle Linux database server. They were constrained by their 10-year-old Sparc environment, with no path for growth, and rising maintenance costs. I helped them lay out a pathway to migrate their development, staging, training, and finally, their production environment to the new hardware. Working with their in-house development team, we migrated both their homegrown software, as well as the AOL Web Server package over to Linux, creating a high availability cluster of four web/tomcat servers. Later we migrated all of their physical servers to a VMware cluster environment, reducing their space, cooling, and power consumption.
Oct/2009 to Dec/2012
Linux Consultant
MrSEC.com
Knoxville, TN
MrSEC is a popular sporting news website ran on Debian, utilizing WordPress, and MySQL. They had to deal with the trials and tribulations of instant success that comes from their news stories going viral.
My duties generally included MySQL administration, Firewall configuration, Apache tuning, and mitigation of Denial Of Service, and Dictionary attacks.
I moved their site from a single instance virtual host to a dedicated server running ESXi. I Deployed multiple virtual instances dedicated to Apache, MySQL, and Varnish Cache to alleviate the heavy load from increased traffic. This significantly stabilized their environment and got them ready for the next big push in sporting news.
Feb/2010 to Nov/2010
Enterprise Linux Engineer
Rackspace Hosting
San Antonio, TX 78218
During my time with Rackspace, I spent most of my time doing break-fix work for fortune 500 companies. Most of this involved Red Hat Enterprise Linux in redundant or high availability configurations. Apache configurations, MySQL administration, network configuration, and hardware diagnostics.
Jun/2006 to Nov/2007
Unix Systems Engineer
Office of Science and Technical Information, D.O.E.
Oak Ridge, TN 37830
OSTI is a US Department of Energy program within the Department of Science. OSTI hosts the Science.gov portal and a dozen other science-related websites, providing “the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States.”
While working for OSTI, I deployed and managed over 20 terabytes of storage spread over a Sun Microsystems 6130 array (FC, SATA, SAS), and two T3 storage trays of Fibre attached SCSI drives. All of this storage was accessed through McData (now Brocade) fibre SAN switches, and managed by Veritas Volume Manager on the servers. I also administered a collection of Solaris systems, Red Hat Enterprise 4 servers, and EMC Legato Networker.
Apr/2002 to Jan/2006
Unix Systems Engineer / PACS Technical Lead / Research Lab Manager
UT Medical Center
Knoxville, TN 37918
While at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, I administered the Radiology department’s production systems, managed a medical image research lab, administered network peripherals, and acted as technical liaison to the vendors of our PACS (Picture Archive & Communication System), SAN, and medical modalities.
I am a certified system administer of GE PACS Pathspeed and Centricity product lines. I am versed in the administration of their ISU server software running on a Sun V480 with attached HP EVA-SAN, GE tape archives, and their Enterprise Archiver, including an EMC Centera SAN archive.
Jun/2000 to May/2001
Solaris Administrator /
Project Lead
Pearson Education
Columbus, OH 43240
My position as Project Leader, and System Administrator, required me to screen, hire, and manage six programmers, and a dozen Sun workstations, while filling in for programming gaps.
The project was to port a proprietary software package written in seven different languages, from Sun OS to Solaris. To say the least, this was a programming fiasco. My time was split between coordinating programmers in several different states, discovering how this package was put together, and straightening out the code. Once we finished porting the software, I had the final job of implementing new Ultra-Sparc 5’s, and an Ultra Enterprise 250 into the existing environment, with little to no downtime.
Jan/1990 to July/1990
Senior Unix Administrator
State of Ohio, Dept. of Human Services
Columbus, OH 43017
While on contract to the State of Ohio, I administrated approximately 20 Sun (Sparc, and Ultra Sparc), and HP-UX servers, during the critical Y2K time-period. My daily activities include general system maintenance, Check Point Firewall maintenance, Secure-ID maintenance, NIS, and NFS maintenance, deployment, and upgrades, along with project planning, documentation, and script production. My job was to keep the systems that provide essential network services, along with systems that provide network monitoring, for the second largest network in Ohio, up and running 100% of the time.
Dec/1997 to Aug/1999
Senior Unix Administrator
Lucent Technologies
Columbus, OH 43235
While at Lucent Technologies, I administered 30 different production servers (Sun Sparc, Sun Ultra Sparc, Sun Ultra Enterprise 4500, and 10000, High Availability Cluster DEC VAR systems, Network Appliance, AT&T, NCR, and Windows NT) running Oracle, NFS, web services, and doing product compiles. There were also approximately 400 workstations running Sun OS, Solaris, and DEC-OS (OSF1 v3.2), which were managed by NIS. My primary responsibilities included backups (BudTool, and Legato), network coordination and planning, as well as tools, applications maintenance, printer queue maintenance, Veritas Volume disk managing, and general all-round system administration.
Jan/1997 to Oct/1997
Unix Administrator
IBM Global Services (formally Advantis)
Downers Grove, IL 60515
While on contract, I system administrated three NCR 5100 platforms, and one 3600 platform for Sears, running MP-RAS. This involved problem, and change management, handling user’s requests, tracking performance, migration, crash recovery, and updating and installing new software, and services.
In addition to administrating the NCR equipment, I administered a RISC 6K box running AIX. This box was used to monitor the NCR equipment and kick off notification when a problem arises. To do this, I wrote shell scripts and utilized a software package from BMC, called Patrol.
Jan/1990 to July/1990
Systems Engineer
CMHC Systems
Dublin, OH 43017
As a Systems Engineer, I was responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of customers’ systems running AIX, SCO 3.2 (all versions up to 4.2), SCO 5.0, Unisys, or HP-UX. I handled advanced troubleshooting, dial-up networking, hardware malfunction, and recovering after major crashes.
When I wasn’t handling maintenance or troubleshooting, my responsibilities were to write, support, and document shell scripts for in-house and customer usage.
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