David Pashley

Runtime Collective is a software development company, specialising in knowledge management, with expertise in content management systems and search applications. They have a significant market in the local authority website arena, with several high profile council customers, through the LAWS project. In recent years they have expanded in to search engines with their Searchbox product.

My role at Runtime Collective is part of the small Support department and is a systems-level support position. My responsibilities include supporting, maintaining and updating remotely hosted servers running our clients' web applications. These are either our own servers hosted in a colo facility in London Docklands or hosted by clients. These involve significant knowledge of Linux (Red Hat and Debian), PostgreSQL, Oracle, Tomcat and Java. The Support department are client facing and are initial point of contact for any technical support issues, either through email or telephone. As such, I am also responsible for the initial investigation of issues and assigning the issue to the appropriate person or resolving the issue.The work often involves working directly on the code base, improving the build system or back-porting patches from other branches.

The Support department are also responsible for maintaining the internal systems and supporting developers. To this aim, I am responsible for the running of 20 Linux workstations, many network booting, 5 Linux/Windows laptops, 10 Linux servers and several Windows servers. I am responsible for company wide services like mail, wiki and intranet and developer services like continuous integration, software packaging and version control repositories. This can involve modifying open source software to integrate with our existing infrastructure or developing new software.

SMT Network Solutions provide a range of services to small and medium sized enterprises. These include data cabling, IP-based telephony systems and managed server appliances.

My role at SMT was split into two parts. I worked in the support department, dealing with customers' problems over the phone and fixing them. In the case of a more complex issue, I would work to fix the problems and keep the customer updated with the status. On occasions this would involve travelling to a customer's site to fix problems or carry out a new installation.

The second part of my role involved implementing a new product range of web-server appliances for the ISP market. This involved porting the recently open-sourced Cobalt RaQ software from the Red Hat base to Debian. This project was implemented in a mixture of C, C++, Perl and PHP, in addition to the system administration aspect to the project.

PGL IT is a small computer consultancy company based in Cranfield, Bedfordshire with two technical staff. The company has a number of clients mainly in the recruitment area and provide a range of services from cabling to supplying hardware and software to maintenance of customers systems.

I was jointly in charge of system administration of the company's customer's servers and workstations. This included site visits and remote management. I was responsible for setting up and configuring the Linux based servers. Common services included the Exim SMTP server, Courier IMAP server and Samba to provide file serving to Windows clients. I have dealt with Sophos anti-virus software on Windows and Unix platforms. I also gained a Citrix Certified Administrator certification.

I was also responsible for setting up and configuring customers routers, firewalls and VPN connections. This was done using a custom Linux distribution derived from Debian which is able to boot from a CD and store settings on a floppy disk to improve security.

I also dealt with building computers and installing and configuring a range of operating systems including Windows 98, NT, 2000 and XP, and Linux. The job involved diagnosing and fixing both hardware and software problems. This could involve fixing problems over the phone talking directly to customers.

The job involved a variety of programming tasks from scripting system administration tasks to writing larger projects, including a program to detect if a network link had failed and automatically bring up an alternative network connection. Most of this scripting was done using perl, python or shell scripting.

I was employed by my university department during a summer break to developed a web-based replacement for their student information system. The database stored information current and past students, the modules they had taken, any awards they may have won, which tutor they had and timetable information.

The old system was using a Ingres database and Unix command line programs. The replacement was developed in Perl and used the Apache webserver, running on Linux, with a MySQL backend database. The system involved using the DBI and CGI Perl modules.

I was involved in rolling out Windows NT to several hundred student computer across the campus. This included both the planning stages and the actual roll out of the operating system and other software including Office 97.

I was part of a team responsible for second line support of both staff and student computers. This involved diagnosing and fixing both hardware and software problems.

Part of the job was to work as an operator, carrying out backups and file restores on a mixture of Windows NT, Digital Unix and OpenVMS systems. I was also jointly responsible for administering student printers around the campus.