Work
I am an experienced Sun and Solaris systems administrator, with skills in the following areas:
- Sun hardware - sparc and x86/x64; server and desktop, up to the V880 and V890.
- Sun storage - workgroup, mostly, like T3/SE3310/A1000/A3500/A5x00/SE3510
- System installation, customization, and configuration, particularly jumpstart
- Backup - Sun Storedge Backup (Legato)
- Solaris all the way from 2.3 to 10 and OpenSolaris/Nevada
- Solaris x86/x64 on Sun and Dell hardware
- DNS, NIS and NISplus; some LDAP (iPlanet)
- NFS and the automounter
- Web servers: apache, tomcat, installation and configuration
- Web sites: HTML, jsp, cgi, CSS, style and design (particularly simple standards compliant designs that work well in all browsers).
- Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, with some older Sybase and Oracle experience
- Other OSes: AIX, IRIX, Linux, some of the BSD flavours.
I have worked with Sun for many years on software and hardware beta programs, most recently as a Solaris 10 Platinum Beta customer, and am part of the OpenSolaris community.
Interests
What do I do when not at work? Well for one thing - Bell Ringing. I tend to watch TV and read a lot. I've a passing interest in genealogy that I hope to be able to find more time for and finally fill in that family tree. I'm an inveterate Trekker. And, I'm interested in computer games and operating systems.
Brief History
After doing an undergraduate degree in Physics at St John's College, Oxford, I stayed on and did a Doctorate in Theoretical Astrophysics.
I then moved on CITA - the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. (Toronto's a great place - we really enjoyed our two years there.)
Then back to England, to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.
Then a rather major change in direction - from Astronomy to Computing, managing the systems at the MRC RFCGR, located on the Hinxton Genome Campus a few miles south of Cambridge. Here we ran Sun servers running Solaris providing access to databases and computing facilities for researchers in the UK Genome community.
After a brief stint looking after the main Sun servers at the University of Hertfordshire, I'm back much closer to home at ProQuest Information and Learning.