Danny Howard New York, NY
Unix Systems Administration [email protected]

Charter

Coupling my breadth of experience and a personal ethic of service, I will develop, maintain, and support your Unix-based infrastructure, to ensure maximum organizational awesomeness.

Skills

Operating Systems: Server: FreeBSD, Red Hat, SuSE, Solaris
Desktop: Ubuntu, Windows
Software Development: Python, Django, Perl, Makefiles, shell scripting, PHP, C, JavaScript
Primarily develop and contribute to web-based and command-line tools for systems management, software deployment, and team collaboration.
Documentation: Formal education in technical and professional writing
Highly proficient with HTML and CSS
Extensive experience with blog, wiki, knowledgebase software
Habitually record work completed, followup documentation, explanatory comments in scripts and code
Issue Tracking: Wrote e-mail interface for Bugzilla, administration of RT and Kayako, familiarity with Trac and GNATS
E-mail Infrastructure: Postfix, Courier, Qmail, Sendmail, Cyrus
Virus scanning, content filtering, anti-spam, e-mail list administration, archiving
Network Management: Experience deploying and maintaining Apache, Nagios, Cacti, RRDtool
Experience managing cfengine, DHCP, DNS, LDAP, BGP, CARP, NAT, VLANs, firewalls, load balancers
Disaster Recovery: Implement, maintain, trouble-shoot AMANDA
Maintain, support Veritas NetBackup, Bacula, Backup Exec
Manage off-site vendor relationships
Unix tools: dump, tar, robot manipulation, scripting

Employment History

Senior Unix Systems Administrator
Cisco Systems (San Bruno, CA 2007 - present)
As an individual contributor, maintained operation of Cisco IronPort's spam analysis infrastructure, including problem analysis, software and hardware deployment, policy maintenance, and participation in pager rotation.
Documented existing practices to facilitate training of new members, developed checklists to improve consistency of completed work.
Extended server inventory application to support management, audit and visualization of server location within racks, and automated management of DHCP servers.
Developed a modular system to present work performed by team members in a "social media" style interface.
Lead Unix Systems Administrator
Yelp, Inc. (San Francisco, CA 2006 - 2007)
Expanded production network infrastructure to accommodate rapidly growing traffic. Improved monitoring procedures and implemented expanded graphing of systems performance data to improve trend analysis. Re-implemented Disaster Recovery services.
Collaborated with development team to create and maintain an operations "run book". Promoted cultural best practices via routine status reports, incident reports, and forensic analyses. Enthusiastically engaged user community, relaying suggestions and concerns to appropriate staff.
Senior Unix Systems Administrator
Nextrials, Inc. (San Ramon, CA 2004 - 2006)
Re-designed production network to improve manageability, resiliency, and performance. Purchased, documented, tested and deployed new networks in Reston, VA and San Jose, CA. Maintained systems documentation for internal use, and for third-party audits to ensure IQ/OQ/PQ compliance. Delivered technical "brown bag" presentation to staff. Deployed improved monitoring and trending software.
Supervised systems staff to ensure technical execution met management expectations. Tracked systems expenditures for management review.
Manager of Technical Support and Managed Hosting Services
Server Central Networks (Chicago, IL 2003 - 2004)
Ensured that technical support requests were fulfilled on a consistent basis by staff operating 24x7. Developed documentation, deployed and monitored software knowledgebase systems for customers and staff. Ensured that all escalated issues were resolved.
Managed daily operations of Cobalt and Plesk-based web and e-mail hosting services on Linux and FreeBSD. Managed internal systems for issue tracking, knowledgebase, and systems monitoring. Interfaced with service and software vendors to resolve issues. Managed additional systems as required.
Senior Unix Systems Administrator, MIS
Transmeta Corporation (Santa Clara, CA 2002)
Advised e-mail infrastructure upgrade to support spam filtering via Postfix and SpamAssassin. Researched LDAP-based mail routing. Developed documentation maintenance system, compiled help desk documentation. Reviewed LDAP infrastructure and conducted account audits.
Lead Unix Systems Administrator, Corporate Operations
Tellme Networks (Mountain View, CA 1999 - 2001)
Developed and maintained core Unix-based Information Services as company grew from twelve to 250 employees. Transferred responsibilities and services to new teams and technologies as they became available. Continuously (re)implemented and migrated to improved solutions, emphasizing user-level transparency.
Implemented flexible and scalable e-mail architecture that included virus scanning. Developed web-based mailing list software. Maintained original firewall and office network. Implemented first co-located "production" service. Thoroughly researched and deployed LDAP re-implementation. CGI development for other teams.
Systems and Network Administrator
EnterAct, L.L.C. (Chicago, IL - 1998 to 1999)
Managed FreeBSD servers, supporting web, e-mail, and shell access for over 15,000 users. Performed DNS and subnet allocations. Authored, documented, maintained and audited support software and systems for employees and customers in Perl, C, csh and sh. Provided routine Unix support for other departments.

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
BA in English Rhetoric: Professional Writing
Minor in Computer Science: Programming Languages, Compilers and Networking
Additional course work in Linguistics