Contact Details
John AT Target - earth DOT net
Mini-CV
If you are a prospective employer, please contact me for a copy of my full CV.
Personal Information
Male
British nationality
UK resident
Non-smoker
Holder of full UK driving license and own personal transport.
Professional Experience
Unix & Web Infrastructure Management
2007 - Current
Faculty of Medical Sciences Computing Unit, Newcastle University.
Unix Systems Administrator / IT Support Specialist
2003 - 2007
Faculty of Medical Sciences Computing Unit, University of Newcastle
Systems Deployment
2003
Johnson Matthey Catalysts, Teesside
Deputy Test Systems Management & Infrastructure Engineer
2001 - 2003
QinetiQ, DERA Malvern, Worcestershire
Infrastructure Engineer
1999 - 2000
Defence Evaluation & Research Agency, Malvern, Worcestershire
Education
Information Security Foundation Course
QinetiQ, DERA Malvern
BSc (Hons) Computer Science
Teesside University
Specialising in Distributed Computing, Operating Systems Design, Systems Architecture
and Network Technology. Final year project included a multi-threaded Voice Over IP network
application and libraries written in C, for Silicon Graphics IRIX and Linux workstations.
A-Levels in Computer Science, Biology, English
Durham Sixth Form Centre
9 GCSE's - A* to B
Wellfield Comprehensive, Durham
Technical Experience and Skills
UNIX Systems and Hardware
Sun Microsystems; Sparc/UltraSparc workstation and Enterprise server platforms,
Intel/AMD Fire/X-series server platforms. Sun disk enclosures and StorEdge hardware.
Solaris 8 through 10, Solstice Disksuite, Veritas Volume Manager. Various Sun LOM management interfaces.
Apple server systems; PowerPC/Intel XServe platforms, XServe-RAID disk enclosures. OS X and OS X Server.
Extensive use and support of Linux since very early kernel releases in the early 90’s. Use on Intel/AMD 32/64bit
and various non-x86 architecture including ARM, Alpha and Sparc. Distributions include RedHat (Fedora and AS/ES),
SuSE, Debian, Slackware, and various appliance based systemssuch as Smoothwall and IPCop.
Large experience of server and desktop PC technology; HP, Dell, IBM etc. Silicon Graphics workstation
hardware (Indigo2/O2/Octane).
Secure working knowledge of Irix, NetBSD and OpenBSD Unix operating systems.
Database Technology
MySQL, Postgres, Oracle (XE); setup, administration, tuning, backup, recovery. Working
knowledge of SQL langauge and syntax.
LDAP directory systems (OpenLDAP); setup, administration, backup and recovery.
Network Technology
Deployment of Web and Web application servers and frameworks. Apache httpd (1.3/2.x),
Apache Tomcat, Z Object Persistence Engine (Zope), Z Enterprise Object Server,
Ruby on Rails, PHP, Perl, Django.
Squid and other caching frameworks (memcached).
Unix and Windows interoperation; Samba and Active Directory authentication for UNIX (winbind).
Centralised user accounts using LDAP.
Email (Postfix, Sendmail), email lists (mailman) and email+web integration (Squirrelmail).
Single-Sign-On authentication (Auth-N) and authorisation (Auth-Z) solutions; Yale CAS
(Central Auth Service), Shibboleth.
Firewalls (software and appliances), TCP/IP networking, Wireless and Wireless
management infrastructure platforms (3Com).
Streaming media content delivery (QTSS/Darwin Streaming Server, Flash, etc.)
Specialist Areas
Web services provision (especially in regard to high performance and high resilience).
Clustering and load-balancing using off the shelf appliances (Zeus ZXTM, F5 Systems) and
commodity hardware and open source software (Linux IPVS/LVS, Heartbeat, Pound, iptables, pf).
System monitoring and automation technology (Nagios, rrdtools, Cacti etc.).
Programming and Other Skills
Extensive use of Unix shell scripting (Bash/Csh) and text processing tools (sed, awk etc.).
Previous experience with C (networking/sockets and multi-threaded coding) and also use of
cross-compilation tools to build applications for embedded devices (CEGCC for Windows
CE & Pocket PC platforms).
Working knowledge of Ruby/Rails. Some experience of Java, Python, Perl and PHP.
Use and support of virtually all Microsoft Windows operating systems (Windows 2000-XP-Vista)
and office applications.
DTP/Page layout (QuarkXPress), Image manipulation and editing. Audio/Video editing,
format conversion and delivery.
This page updated: 24/Feb/2008
