Objective: to help large critical systems scale, while making them 2am friendly.

Work Experience:

Apple Inc. Sunnyvale, CA
Network Automation
July 2016 - Present

• Generalized duties not postable at this time

Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale, CA
Distinguished Architect, Operations
May 2007 - July 2016

Responsibilities

• Principal role: IPv6 evangelist. Technical guidance across all levels of the engineering and operations divisions; as well as potential business impacts to IPv6 (or lack thereof) to all parts of the company. Public speaker at IPv6 related conferences; and at local companies considering IPv6.
• Member of Tech Council, representing Infrastructure
• Network ACL overhaul project to scale to hundreds of thousands of machines
• Designed and built network configuration audit system
• F5 global load balancer configuration and deployment system allowed for simpler global configuration and safer, easier management. Built a "CLI" for F5 before they offered one themselves.
• Tools and automation for network devices; mass deployment, upgrades, migrations, etc in an environment that currently has ~20k network devices
• Backbone configuration generation to make managing the Yahoo! backbone easier
• Systems background lets me look at network and systems management from a large scale perspective
• Ongoing consultation and training for web search production engineering

test-ipv6.com - IPv6 Test for end users
April 2010 - Present

• Highlighted by the Internet Society for World IPv6 Day
• Designed and built browser based javascript test system for IPv6 readiness
• Includes testing for incorrectly configured IPv6 that causes browser failures going to dual-stack IPv4+IPv6 web sites by IPv4-only users
• Open source (Several mirrors; and at least one commercial integration by Comcast)

Yahoo Corporation Sunnyvale, CA
Inktomi Web Search division
Production Engineering
April 1999 - April 2007

Responsibilities:

• Part of small team that manages tens of thousands of machines in a large scale 24x7 production environment
• Responsible from when the hardware is turned over, to the customer facing product, in a business critical production environment
• Monitoring, responding, diverting, fixing services with priority on customer impact
• Build the metric gathering and display system which providers primary performance data to the team
• All work done generally done on thousands of machines at a time
• Designed and built an efficient mass Linux install and upgrade system
• Custom software for transporting new product releases and configurations
• Engineering to support the products released by internal divisions (primarily perl; some C)
• Manage host/router OSPF and BGP interactions for Web Search
• Part of team that provides the "glue" to keep diversely built products working
• Project support representing operations team; keeping new developers aware of "the real world". Performance, availability, scalability, security.
• Part of 24x7 team managing Linux and Solaris clusters world-wide; emphasis has been on Linux since 2003.

Cylink, Inc - USPS ECS project
System Administration (Contract)
Septempber 1, 1998 - April 24, 1999

Responsibilities:

• Preparation of Project Systems for US Postal Service acceptance
• Security Detailing and profiling Certification Application for USPS's sensitive and critical needs
• Solaris Administration, Installation and maintenance of Gauntlet Firewall Software
• Cisco Border Router Security Overhaul
• Source Version Control and Data Recovery planning
• Maintenance and enhancement of existing Windows C++ client and Unix C server code.

CalWeb Internet Services, Inc.
Sr. System Administrator
April 16, 1996 - September, 1998

Responsibilities:

• Manage and support ethernet networks supporting TCP/IP running UNIX servers and Microsoft Windows in LAN and WAN environments
• UNIX Architecture, Design, Installation, Configuration, Integration and Management.
• Custom C/Perl programming to customize available software packages to the ISP environment
• Windows NT, Windows95 Internet integration
• HTML and CGI development
• Internet and Intranet (Apache)
• Switches, Routers and Hubs; OSPF, BGP
• Remote Access Server equipment - Cisco, Livingston, Ascend
• Provide Software & Hardware support
• Solve connectivity problems, often at a protocol level
• Managed over Jr. Admin and News Admin positions, including training for position
• Managed hardware and network vendors

InfoMania Prepress and Design
Jr. Admin, Digital Output Technician
October 94 - April 16, 96

Responsibilities:

• Streamline and monitor day-to-day needs of client-server process
• Manage and support ethernet networks supporting TCP/IP and Appletalk running Solaris UNIX servers and Macintosh workstations
• Manage WAN services and vendors for connectivity to clients
• Examine, debug, and output high resolution film in preparation for press

Self Employment
Shareware Author specializing in online communications
June 91 - Present

Provide freelance internet and remote system administration for hire.

Designed, implemented, maintained, and marketed software using the "Shareware" concept

Author, Internet/BBS gateway software: "GIGO" translates private email and message forums from the public internet to private community BBS packages. This software had been instrumental in bringing message connectivity to many foreign countries with the aid of organizations such as NSNET and Permanet. Many of the sites that started using my software to bring affordable communications to their community later in turn became internet service providers as the cost of communications to these countries dropped in price. (April 1994 to May 1997)

Author, BBS remote-access communication software: "WME" a full-screen TTY driven menued environment for accessing file and message based services. 400+ registered sites around the world used this package before it had to be decommissioned in 1994 due to higher priorities. (June 1991 to October 1994)

Qualifications

I'm a jack of all trades; a hybrid developer and SA, with the paranoia of a security admin. I'm familiar with a lot; but not necessarily intimate with everything. I can get intimate with the proper resources when the need presents itself.

Server OS: Linux, BSD, Solaris

Security: Competent with CGI, script, and C application auditing; general network security. Routers and switches do not provide authoritative security. Never trust the inputs. Security is a feature of doing my job well, but not my primary and undivided focus.

Network: Able to debug routing and switching issues. I know about duplex. I can use tcpdump. My production engineering role involved investigating, fixing, and configuring ARP, OSPF and BGP.

Unix: apache and related; postfix, sendmail, spamassassin, qpopper, cyrus, dovecot, bind, djbdns, radius, rwhoisd; custom antispam defenses
Services: - WWW, Secure WWW, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, NIS, MySQL, SSH, CVS

Metrics: I'm big on collecting information about how things work - instrumenting or having other apps properly instrumented to provide the data, and using tools such as RRD to make the data understandable. A large part of this is making the data easily and logically available in such a way that diagnosing the unhealthy parts of a large complex system becomes easy.

Languages: Go, Perl, PHP, HTML, CGI, C, JS, Python, basic SQL. At one time: Pascal, 80x86 assembly. Able to pick up anything quickly. Favorite working langauge is Go; prior to that, for 20 years, it was Perl. I'm not religious about langauge - I'm more concerned about there being a common language amongst the teams.

Availability

Currently not actively seeking; however, willing to chat for interesting opportunities.

About Me:

I am a system administrator with a heavy side of programming. My background is heavily influenced by being "the guy" at an Internet Service Provider; and with being on a hard core team keeping the Yahoo search engine and supporting infrastructure working. I believe IPv6 is critical to the continued success of the Internet. I code Perl on a daily basis. O'Reilly books are an essential part of life. I am a licensed private pilot.

References: on request