Work
I am an experienced Systems Administrator and Engineer, with skills in the following areas:
- Whole stack: understanding applications, networks, systems, storage, databases, security, performance, from end to end and top to bottom
- Solaris and illumos distributions, on x86/x64 and SPARC
- Java - maintainer of the illumos/Solaris OpenJDK port
- Security - achieving ISO27001 at Haplo
- Containerization - Solaris Zones and Docker
- Open Source - software and community
- Cloud - mostly AWS, some Azure
- ZFS, the last word in filesystems
- Web servers: nginx, haproxy, apache, tomcat, installation and configuration
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, some Oracle
- Other OSes: Linux (I was an RHCE back in the days of RHEL 5), some of the BSD flavours, even Windows
I worked with Sun for many years on software and hardware beta programs, and was part of the OpenSolaris community where I served on the OpenSolaris Governing Board, before that got Oracled and replaced by illumos and OpenIndiana, following on I built my own distribution - Tribblix.
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 to CITA - the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. And then back to England, to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Those interested can read some of my published papers.
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, providing access to databases and computing facilities for researchers in the UK Genome community.
After a brief stint at the University of Hertfordshire, I spent almost 9 years much closer to home at ProQuest, then 7 years at Haplo, now acquired by Cayuse, followed by a stint as Head of Information Security at Omnigen Biodata.
I'm now working on illumos and Tribblix, and hoping to spend more time on my activities and interests.