- Gartner
-
At the beginning of 2000, I decided to take a detour from my
engineering management career to go into market research. I thought
about what research companies I really trusted to be intelligent and
authoritative, decided on Gartner (formerly the Gartner Group), and
submitted a resume to them. Now I work on the Dataquest side, sizing
and forecasting the ISP and Web-hosting markets, and providing strategic
advice to vendor clients.
- Excite@Home
-
I was the Director of Server Engineering for the @Home Network (cable
Internet service) side of Excite@Home. I managed a bunch of different
stuff over the course of a year, focused primarily around systems
architecture and capacity planning, software development, enterprise
management, and field server deployment for the core infrastructure
and services for @Home's offerings.
- DIGEX
-
I've worked in all major aspects of the ISP business now, through my
association with DIGEX: the website hosting business (as a programmer
and sysadmin), the consumer dialup business (as the lead of the
operations team, and as a product manager), and the leased line
business, where I was a product manager, and later, director of
product operations and engineering, where the two teams under me
handled maintenance of existing systems, and general product research
and development, respectively.
- University of Pennsylvania: Computer and Information Science Department
-
I worked for the CIS department as an assistant systems administrator for
several years. I started out in the
Distributed Systems
Laboratory, where I tried to discipline a rather ornery set of
IBM RS/6000 workstations and a hodgepodge of other hardware running
the entire vendor gamut from Sun to Hewlett-Packard. The DSL does
gigabit networking, which got me involved with experimental ATM
technology. I then went on to wrangle Silicon Graphics (SGI) machines,
for the Computer Graphics Laboratory (later renamed the
Center for Human Modeling
and Simulation), which produces the virtual-reality human modeling
software, JACK
(see the June 1994 issue of Discover for more).
- General Electric
-
My first real, corporate, job, I was a summer intern at the Advanced
Technology Laboratories, part of General Electric Aerospace, where
I worked in the systems administration group, writing a client/server
trouble ticketing system.
- Independent work
-
I did UNIX and website consulting for a number of years, as well as
a fair amount of freelance writing, including a book for
O'Reilly and Associates,
a chapter in Net Games 2 for Michael Wolff Publishing,
a chapter in Tricks of the Internet Gurus for SAMS Publishing
(unfortunately currently miscredited), articles for
Vision Quest magazine,
and a section in the Fourth Edition of the Ars Magica
roleplaying game by Atlas
Games. I also tech review from time to time -- recently, Alan
Schwartz's Managing Mailing Lists for O'Reilly and Associates.
- Godlike
-
Though I've never actually made a cent off it, as it's been operated
on a deliberately break-even basis, Godlike is technically a business
that hosts MUSHes. I do general systems adminstration and systems
programming for our small cluster of Sun servers, some Web development
and associated scripting, the occasional bit of Remedy development,
and wrote a bunch of the code that makes the entire thing run in a
more or less automated fashion.
Technical Skills:
- UNIX systems programming
-
I can do systems programming down to the kernel level, TCP/IP network
programming, and CGI and other Web magic, among other things. I've
contributed to a variety of open
source projects over the years. I've also got a decent knowledge
of formal software engineering, though in a more managerial sense.
I'm fluent in C, Python (my current language of choice), perl, and Bourne/Korn shell. I can write just about anything else given a couple of minutes with a book. Other languages I've done projects in but haven't worked with enough to remember without a glance at the book for syntax and such are Tcl/Tk, Expect (extension to Tcl/Tk), SQL (MySQL's my preference, though I can cope with mSQL and Oracle PL/SQL), and awk. I've also got reasonable Remedy Action Request System development skills.
I've gotten exposure in a more or less academic sense to Java, Pascal, Scheme, Standard ML, Sun SPARC assembly, and Prolog, but of those languages, the only one I ever want to touch again is Java.
- UNIX systems administration
-
Though I'm most comfortable with SunOS/Solaris and Irix, I've dealt
with various ornery Unixen of both the BSD and System V varieties:
Linux, BSDI, NetBSD, AIX, HP-UX, Digital Unix, Dynix/PTX, NeXT's MachOS,
you name it. For casual use, I prefer a Macintosh, but I can cope with
a Windows-based PC.
Internet servers in data center environments are really my focus, though I have some out-of-date knowledge on how to run academic computing environments. My webserver software of choice is Zeus, but I'll deal with Apache since it's free. I prefer QMail, but professionally I've mostly worked with sendmail. I prefer GNU mailman as a list manager, but I've run listproc and majordomo installations, too. ProFTPd is terrific, but the Wu-FTPd is okay, too. I can also cope with the usual things: DNS servers, RADIUS servers, and so forth.
People who've worked with me say I'm not a "true" systems administrator, but rather a developer with operations skills, since I'm not much of a hardware geek; I'm much more someone who tends to see things from the holistic standpoint of "everything from the network to the applications", debugging things by figuring out what's happening, how everything works together (especially the interaction between the application and the operating system), and then finding the break in the chain and fixing that.
- Networking
-
Though I'm not a network engineer, I know the jargon and the architectures
and how things work, though you're unlikely to catch me trying to configure
a router. I understand TCP/IP, LAN and WAN topology, and the bunch of
devices you see in data centers today -- routers, switches, load balancers
(software and hardware), and so forth. I have a pretty good understanding
of telephony and cable systems, too.
- Security
-
It's been a long time since I did security hands-on, so my reading is up
to date but my knowledge of packages is old. I understand modern security
architecture, though: firewalls, encryption, and the like. I can work with
Kerberos and SSH, and I'm a fan of TCP wrappers, tripwire, and the like.
I used to run SATAN, COPS, tiger, crack, and so forth on my systems.
- Other Stuff
- I've worked with a bunch of development support tools: RCS, SCCS, CVS, Purify and PureCoverage, m4, autoconf, gdb, and various other GNU things. I can write documentation in LaTeX, nroff, and troff, and do diagrams in Visio. I also do the occasional bit of Web graphics in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
Maintained by lwl@godlike.com
Created 07.31.94 | Revised 09.04.03