Curriculum Vitae

Personal Details

Date of Birth:        4 May 1957

Nationality:           British

Marital Status:      Single

Education

Sheffield University, B.Sc. Pure Mathematics (Special Honours), First Class (July 1979).

Manchester University, M.Sc. Computer Science (September 1980).

Publications

Co-author of the paper [snip] presented to the [snip], London, April 1988.

Languages

Bilingual: French/English (including writing technical documents in French).

Courses attended

The Instruction Set Unix Kernel Design, 1987.

The Instruction Set Unix Systems Administration, 1987.

Sun Enterprise Cluster High Availability 2.x Administration, April 1999.

Disclaimer

Please note that I have no direct experience of the MVS world. My experience of COBOL/CICS/DB2 comes from porting such MVS applications to other environments.

Personal Interests

Contributed PHP/MySQL scripts and some basic JavaScript to the implementation of the British Automobile Racing Club - South Eastern Centre web site

Employment History

[snip], Salford, England (08 Jan 2007 – 30 Oct 2007)

Position:        Designer and Solaris Engineer, BT Solaris Consolidation Project

Platforms:      Solaris 10 on T2000, V490.

Skills:              Solaris 10.

I am working in the Design, Analysis and Planning (DAP) team on a large consolidation and virtualisation project for [snip]. Half of the DAP team is composed of Sun personnel. The goal is to migrate the applications from about 1000 servers to Solaris 10 zones on about 150 latest generation Sun (mainly T2000) servers.

The application environments to be migrated include clustered servers (VCS and Sun Cluster) and large Oracle databases.

[snip], Brussels, Belgium (05 Dec 2005 – 30 Nov 2006)

Position:        Contract SAN Administrator

Platforms:      HP-UX on a range of HP machines, Solaris on range of SUN and Fujitsu-Siemens machines; Tru64 on a range of Alpha machines; EMC Symmetrix (DMX, 8730); HDS 9580; NetApp FAS900.

Skills:              Solaris 8 and 9, Tru64 v5.1, HP-UX v11.2, SYMCLI, script writing (Perl, Korn), EMC Control Center, EMC Connectrix, technical documentation.

I worked on site at [snip], near Antwerp, as a SAN administrator on an outsourcing project involving [snip]. I worked onsite at [snip], near Charleroi, for the first 4 months.

I wrote the SAN and NAS administration procedures that are used daily by the SBS administrators.

I developed a set of Perl scripts to facilitate Symmetrix device administration via SYMCLI. I developed a set of Perl scripts to generate reports on Symmetrix device allocations for presentation to [snip].

I also developed scripts to automate the basic task of growing an existing file system using Perl and a small Oracle database. The scripts also interface with the EMC StorageScope database. The intention is that these scripts will be used by operators.

I provided analysis and resolution of problems as they arose. I provide technical solutions for projects that are outside the remit of the SLA. In particular, I developed Perl scripts that facilitate the migration of Solaris and Tru64 file systems on from a Symmetrix or a HDS storage array to another Symmetrix array without interruption to the servers.

[snip], Madrid, Spain (17 Mar 2005 – 28 Oct 2005)

Position:        Contract Consultant in the Professional Services Group

Platforms:      Solaris 8 on E4500 and V440.

Skills:              [snip] Email Mx, Unified Messaging and Webedge, Solaris 8, Sun Cluster 3.0, script writing (Perl, Korn, sqlplus, JSP/Java, TCL, LDAP).

I worked on an email and voicemail project at [snip] in Barcelona until the end of July 2005.

I worked on a video/voice mail project at [snip] in Lisbon from mid August 2005 until the end of October 2005.

I installed and configured early release versions of [snip] products and tested them. I customised TCL scripts involved in SMS generation. I wrote scripts to support provisioning activities on the LDAP directory. I documented installation and upgrade procedures.

At [snip] I performed JSP/Java customisations to the Resin-based Webedge browser application. I also integrated some new applications into the Sun Cluster 3.0 configuration using GDS.

At [snip] I configured private (non-Internet) DNS servers.

[snip], Guildford, England (1 Oct 2004 – 18 Feb 2005)

Position:        Contract Unix Systems Administrator and Oracle Database Administrator on the [snip] Outsource

Platforms:      Solaris 8 and 9 on SF12K and SF15K with clustered domains, V440, V880, and V1280, with EMC Symmetrix.

Skills:              Solaris 8 and 9, Sun Cluster 3.0 and 3.1, Oracle 9i (administration, performance, PL/SQL), Oracle 10g (administration), EMC SYMCLI (Timefinder, SRDF and Base Management) , Veritas Volume Manager 3.2 and 3.5, script writing (awk, Perl, Korn, sqlplus), Legato Networker 6, Systems Programming (in C).

Installed Oracle 10g and migrated a clone of a production database for test purposes.

Problem identification and resolution at hardware, system (Solaris and Veritas) and application levels.

Provided technical support to application developers to resolve problems and improve performance.

Identified a problem with Unidata timeouts and provided a solution in the form of an interposition module written in C to modify low-level functionality.

Designed and implemented a set of Perl scripts building on the CPAN POP3 and MIME modules to replace and improve on an existing mail handling subsystem based on OpenPath.

Provided a procedure and associated scripts using transportable tablespaces to export tablespaces from one Oracle database and import them into another.

[snip], Guildford, England (4 Aug 2003 – 30 Sep 2004)

Position:        Contract Unix Systems Administrator and Oracle Database Administrator

Platforms:      Solaris 8 on SF15K with clustered domains, V880, V1280, Solaris 7 on E10K and a range of Ultra-Enterprises, ReliantUnix 5.45 and 5.43 on a range of RM600s, with an EMC Symmetrix.

Skills:              Solaris 8, Sun Cluster 3.0, Oracle 9i (administration, performance, Streams, PL/SQL), Oracle DataGuard, EMC SYMCLI (Timefinder, SRDF and Base Management), Veritas Volume Manager 3.2 and 3.5, script writing (awk, Perl, Korn, sqlplus), Oracle 10gAS installation, ReliantUnix, Legato Networker 6.

Redesigned and reconfigured the SF15K domain cluster to meet changed business requirements. Placed a Unidata database server and an Oracle 10gAS infrastructure under cluster control using the Generic Data Service.

Configuration of Oracle 9i within the SF15K domain cluster, and for the requirements of Disaster Recovery.

Administered, cloned and tuned Oracle 9i databases on the SF15K clustered domains. Designed and configured the underlying filesystems to maximise database performance using “double-striping” and directio. Reconfigured the physical architecture of databases to improve performance and to conform to Oracle 9i best practices.

Produced a proof-of-concept Oracle Streams implementation to replicate data from a production database to an Operational Data Store.

Automated backups using Timefinder and Networker CLIs.

Worked with a Sun PS consultant to configure primary and standby databases to meet Disaster Recovery requirements using Oracle DataGuard.

Problem identification and resolution at system (Solaris and Veritas) and application levels. Investigation and identification of a performance problem involving process communication across the crossbar switch in a V1280.

Provided technical support to application developers.

[snip], Luxembourg (22 Apr 2002 – 28 Feb 2003)

Position:        Unix Systems Engineer (under contract to Siemens)

Platforms:      ReliantUnix 5.45, on RM300E70 and RM600E45, with FibreCAT disk array using Brocade fabric switch.

Skills:              ReliantUnix (Sinix) with Virtual Disks, problem analysis, Legato Networker, automount, script writing (Perl, Korn), programming (C, Natural), Adabas (basic administration).

Provided technical support for the migration of Natural/Adabas applications from 32bit ReliantUnix 5.43 to 64bit ReliantUnix 5.45. Identified and corrected an error in the multi-path configuration of the FibreCAT. Analysed and provided corrections to the C functions embedded in the Natural executable. Identified and corrected errors in Natural programs. Provided analysis of Sinix crash dumps. Provided analysis of misbehaving programs including Adabas components. Identified an implementation error in the system() libc function and provided a work-around. Identified a race condition in the Adabas driver in the kernel. Identified certain Natural runtime errors as due to incorrect use of signals with pthreads. Implemented a pthread-safe version of signal() for use in an interposition library.

Build and installation of Gnu Multi-Precision Arithmetic Library. Identification of a compiler bug. Implementation of multi-precision arithmetic user-exit for Natural.

[snip], Sandwich, England (20 Aug 2001 – 22 Feb 2002)

Position:        Contract Senior Unix Systems Administrator

Platforms:      Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 8 on whole range of Ultra and Ultra-Enterprise up to E6500, Solaris 2.6 on an E4500 cluster, with SSAs, A3500 and A5x00 disk arrays. IRIX 6.5.13 on [snip] Origin 2000 and Octane.

Skills:              Solaris, Sun Cluster 2.2, SDS, Veritas Volume Manager, Legato Networker, NIS, automount, DNS, script writing (Perl, Korn), Samba, sendmail, Irix.

Performed general systems administration, support and troubleshooting. FDA compliancy requirements required strict change-control procedures.

Produced procedures describing cluster shutdown/startup, project share allocation and various other system administrator tasks.

Developed a test environment to demonstrate reliably a problem on [snip] clients of Solaris NIS servers whereby the [snip] client would fail to find valid map entries. This was accepted by [snip] as a bug.

[snip], London, England (30 Apr 2001 – 20 Jul 2001)

Position:        Contract Unix Systems Administrator

Platforms:      Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, 7 and 8 on whole range of Ultra and Ultra-Enterprise including E10000.

Skills:              NIS, automount, Solaris, SDS, Veritas Volume Manager, script writing (Perl, Korn).

Performed general systems administration and troubleshooting.

Developed Perl scripts to generate system reports and audits (e.g. to verify the validity of the host/console NIS mappings; to identify those Veritas volumes which were not completely mirrored).

Identified the cause of performance problems (thrashing) on a Sybase server as due to overly optimistic use of shared memory.

[snip] , Windsor, England (4 Oct 1999 – 13 Apr 2001)

Position:        Contract Senior Systems Engineer in the Professional Services Group

Platforms:      Solaris 2.6 on E450/E3500/E4500, Solaris 2.6 on E4500 clusters, with D1000, A5100 and A5200 disk arrays, HP‑UX 11 on N4000 and N7000 with XP256 disk arrays, EMC Symmetrix disk arrays.

Skills:              InterMail Mx, Solaris, Sun Cluster 2.2, Veritas Volume Manager, VxFS, Oracle 7 and 8 (basic administration), PL/SQL stored procedures and triggers, Oracle Advanced Queuing and Partitioning, script writing (Perl, Perl with DBI, Korn, LDAP), sendmail.

InterMail Mx deployment, customisation, and consultancy services (including system administration) at: [snip], England (3 months); [snip] Italia Network (TIN), Italy (9 months); NEC/NTT, Japan (3 months); Shanghai Online, China (1 month); [snip], Italy (6 weeks);[snip] Ipswich, England (1 week).

At TIN I redesigned and re-implemented the High Availability and disk architectures to give fast and reliable failover for InterMail and Oracle. I optimised disk performance under Volume Manager. I wrote a suite of Perl scripts to produce InterMail performance reports.

At [snip] I identified and corrected a problem with the configuration of Veritas Cluster logical addresses while testing and refining application failover.

At [snip] I worked on the design and implementation of a back-office Statistics Server to support data mining activities while not affecting the front-office WAP gateway. I used Oracle 8.1.6 making use of Partitioning and the Advanced Queueing option, PL/SQL, and Perl with DBI.

[snip], The Hague, Holland (6 Apr 1999 – 30 Sep 1999)

Position:        Contract Senior Systems Administrator

Platforms:      Solaris 2.6 on an E10000 cluster with A5100 and A5200 disk arrays.

Skills:              Solaris, E10000, Sun Cluster 2.1 and 2.2, Solaris Backup (Legato Networker), Veritas Volume Manager, VxFS, Oracle 7 with Enterprise Backup (EBU) (basic administration), script writing (Perl, Korn).

General system administration in a 24x7 production environment. Cluster High Availability administration. Member of the Capacity Planning and the Performance Enhancement teams.

I designed and implemented a new HA architecture to improve resource usage and performance. This new architecture also gave fast and reliable failover of the applications running on the various clustered domains of the E10Ks. The applications included Oracle and the Customer Care and Billing System (CCBS) product.

I provided analysis of current performance. With these figures I was able to justify, in particular, the use of priority paging and to improve Volume Manager performance by modifying the A5x00 disk layouts. I also identified performance problems associated with CCBS Oracle clients. I modified the Legato Networker configuration to improve backup performance whilst maintaining the general system performance as acceptable.

I produced projections of future performance to allow timely acquisition of extra RAM and extra disk capacity.

I analysed the Client-side SQL code that ran against the Oracle databases to propose performance enhancements.

I provided support to the CCBS developers to identify performance bottlenecks and to investigate alternative strategies.

[snip], Brierley Hill, England (4 Jan 1999 – 2 Apr 1999)

Position:        Contract Systems Administrator

Platforms:      Solaris 2.6 on an E4000 cluster with A3500 disk arrays.

Skills:              Solaris, Sun Cluster 2.1, Oracle 7, Solaris Backup (Legato Networker), script writing (Korn, awk, Perl).

System administration of back-office E4000s for Egg online banking. Developed scripts: to monitor Solaris and Oracle activities and provide timely warnings of errors; to gather and process system statistics to produce resource usage trends; to automate backup procedures using the Solaris Backup product.

Provided technical analysis to management. Provided technical support to developers. Identified a serious performance problem as due to inefficient implementation in a middleware component and provided a solution. Identified and provided solutions to application problems in the production environment.

Improved the performance of data processing scripts to reduce execution time from 7 hours to 2 seconds.

[snip], Berlin, Germany (26 Jan 1998 – 31 Dec 1998)

Position:        Contract Systems Administrator/Engineer in China

Platforms:      Solaris 2.5.1/Sun E4000, Cisco 4700.

Skills:              Solaris, ODS, TCP/IP, X.25, Oracle 7 (basic administration), script writing (Perl, Bourne, Korn).

Installation and system administration of OMC machines for GSM networks in China. Technical support for local operators. Troubleshooting.

Specified administration and trouble-shooting procedures for local operators. Developed scripts to facilitate such tasks.

[snip], Paris, France (Dec 1995 - Dec 1997)

Position:        Contract Designer/Developer

Platforms:      OS/2, Unix (HP 9000, IBM RS6000, Siemens RM300), Windows 95/NT.

Skills:              OOD, VisualC++, MFC, TCP/IP, Client/Server Design, C, MF COBOL, CICS, DB2/2, Oracle 7, Sybase, script writing (awk, Bourne, Korn, REXX).

Design and development of a DB2/CICS emulation environment for COBOL programs under Oracle7/AIX.

Ported [snip] Fregate suite of COBOL programs and associated data to this new environment, via a suite of awk and sed scripts that completely automated the code transformations.

Design and development of client-server middleware. The client side consisted of a VisualC++ class library based on MFS for Windows (95/NT) that managed, in particular, client/server exchanges and tables of data.

Design and development of the server side super-server that managed the environment for COBOL server programs for the platforms CICS/DB2/OS2 and Oracle7/Unix.

Design and development of a VisualC++/MFC class library to provide fast and effective client application development, and of three client applications based on these class libraries. Identification and correction of several bugs in MFC method functions.

Ported COBOL batch programs and associated JCL scripts from MVS to several Unix platforms (HP 9000, IBM RS6000, Siemens RM300).

Ported COBOL SQL programs and associated JCL scripts from MVS/DB2 to several Unix/database platforms (HP 9000 for Oracle V7 and Sybase, Siemens RM300 for Oracle V7).

Creation and administration of databases (DB2/2, Oracle, Sybase).

[snip], Paris, France (joint venture involving [snip]) (Nov 1994 - Nov 1995)

Position:        Contract Designer/Developer

Platforms:      OS/2, Unix.

Skills:              Client/Server Design, C, MF COBOL, CICS, DB2/2 (basic administration), Oracle 7, script writing (awk, Bourne, Korn, REXX).

Ported server applications from C/Oracle/Unix and COBOL/DB2/CICS/MVS environments to DB2/2, in order to provide a standalone training environment for the [snip] Fregate application suite.

Development of integrated interface to the training environment.

Design and development of a DLL to provide Unix IPC emulation under OS/2.

Development of awk scripts to convert Oracle SQL/C programs into DB2/2 SQL/C programs.

[snip], Charleroi, Belgium (May 1994 - Oct 1994)

Position:        Contract Systems Administrator/Engineer

Platforms:      Sunos/SUN.

Skills:              Sunos, ODS, Oracle 6 (basic administration), C, script writing (Bourne).

System administration of OMC machines for a GSM networks in Belgium. Troubleshooting.

Specified administration and trouble-shooting procedures to ensure smooth running of the OMC application and minimise downtime. Development of scripts to automate many such tasks, in particular, an online backup script that split the ODS mirrors and backed up from the offline halves.

Design and development of a set of utilities to give controlled access to certain Sunos tools that require super-user privileges, to allow operators to perform necessary tasks without compromising system security.

[snip], Slough, England (18 Nov 1993 - 29 April 1994)

Position:        Contract Analyst/Programmer

Platforms:      Sunos/SUN, Stratus.

Skills:              Sunos, Oracle 6 and 7 (basic administration), C, PRO*C, script writing (Bourne).

Maintained and developed the centrex provisioning package CenSys which is used by [snip] to provide the Virtual Private Network (VPN) service FeatureNet on a network of Northern Telecom DMS-100 digital switches.

Developed prototypes to provide network distribution of Oracle database tables using Dynamic SQL and SQL*NET between SUN machines running Oracle version 7 and a Stratus machine running Oracle version 6.

Identified a bug in the virtual memory management code of the Stratus kernel.

[snip], Suresnes, France (March 1992 - October 1993)

Position:        Technical Consultant

Platforms:      AIX/RS6000, Windows 3.1, Unix.

Skills:              AIX, MOTIF/X11, Oracle 6 (basic administration), C, script writing (Bourne).

July 93 - October 93

Ported a DOS based CBT application to AIX/MOTIF and to Windows.

Enhanced a Windows based CBT program to add VisualC++ class hierarchies to take advantage of the Microsoft class libraries.

March 92 - June 93

Consultant to [snip] CIT, Vélizy, France for the design and implementation of the Unix based component of the Intelligent Network project (a freephone service). The key to this design was a prioritised event-driven “kernel” that called the appropriate registered callout procedure according to the type of message received.

Developed a data-driven tool to dump data in data structures derived from ASN1 definitions for debugging purposes. The tool used the appropriate symbol table definitions to format the data structures correctly.

Produced technical specifications (in French) for the project.

Specified, configured, and supervised the development and test environments and system administration.

Development of the base functionality for a Unix server that interfaced to programs running on the switch, and to a suite of Minitel/Oracle programs.

[snip], La Défense, France (July 1990 - March 1992)

Position:        Senior Software Systems Engineer

Platforms:      DOS/PC.

Skills:              Borland C for DOS.

Re-implemented a multimedia program suite to improve performance and reliability. Improved the performance of the image scanning subsystem by a factor of 60. Modified the memory allocation scheme to avoid fragmentation issues. Produced debugging versions of the C library memory management functions and an associated analysis program in order to identify memory leaks and other misuses of these functions.

[snip]., London, England (July 1986 - June 1990)

Position:        Technical Consultant (July 1986 - July 1989)

Position:        Senior Technical Consultant (August 1989 - June 1990)

Platforms:      DRS286, MC680x0.

Skills:              C, NFS, TCP/IP, X11, script writing (Bourne), secure Unix, Unix, Unix kernel.

October 89 - June 90

Consultant to [snip] Defence Systems, Reading, England, on a project to deliver a B1 (D.O.D. Orange book) secure version of Unix. Provided system and network administration and crash dump analysis.

Production of design documentation. Responsible (with one other person) for porting and enhancing the security features of a secure version of Unix 5..3 to the DRS 386 and for full system testing and troubleshooting. Identified and corrected a kernel deadlock problem in the inode traversal code.

August 89 - October 89

Team member for the development of an optimising C compiler for an IBM 370 compatible. Responsible for the design and implementation of the Loop-Invariant Optimiser, and for the development of an ANSI C compatible library.

January 88 - July 89

Consultant to graphics workstation manufacturer CETIA, of Toulon, France, with responsibility for kernel and graphics development. Also provided network and system administration.

Resolved problems with the kernel graphics code, in particular in relation to context switching and boundary condition errors, developed new graphics functionality, enhanced graphics performance.

Resolved problems with the NFS and BSD file systems, and TCP/IP and pseudo-terminal drivers. Provided crash dump analysis and enhanced the crash program.

Ported X11 versions 2 and 3, and developed a BSD compatibility library. Designed and developed a graphics compatibility library to allow graphics kernel programs to run under X11 simply by relinking to the new library. This involved simulating a procedural API without compromising the underlying event-driven nature of X11.

April 87 - December 87

Team member for the port of Motorola's System 5.3 Unix to Lynwood diskless workstations, with responsibility for system testing, driver development, NFS integration, and the diskless bootstrap. Produced the macros required to run lint on the kernel sources and so identified and corrected a variety of programming errors which corrected several runtime problems. Identified and corrected a bug in vi due to incorrect use of setjmp() and longjmp().

January 87 - March 87

Team member for the development of an application program suite to access MS-DOS format floppy disks from a BT UNIX machine, with responsibility for high-level functionality and testing.

July 86 - December 86

Consultant to [snip], Birmingham, England, on a Unix multimedia project involving the capture and display of map-related data. Designed and developed the user interface and the graphical display structures and algorithms.

[snip]., Maidenhead, England (June 1983 - June 1986)

Position:        Software Engineer

Platforms:      CCPM/PC.

Skills:              Assembler, C.

Maintained and enhanced an English/Arabic word-processor (in 8086 assembler).

Designed and developed: firmware to provide English/Arabic output on a terminal (in 8086 assembler); a printer front-end for English/Arabic text (in C); printer back-ends for English/Arabic output on various laser, daisy-wheel, and dot-matrix printers (in C).

Co-designed and developed an English/Arabic word-processor (in C).

Manchester University, Manchester, England (October 1980 - March 1983)

Position:        Postgraduate Researcher in Operating Systems

Platforms:      MC68000, Vax750.

Skills:              MUSL, MUSS, kernel design.

Member of the team that ported a new version of the message-passing operating system MUSS to a Vax750, with responsibility for the machine-dependent sections, and system testing. Maintained and enhanced system applications. Member of the team that designed and developed a remote file system.

Ported MUSS to a M68000 based system.