James Neal
- not_open_to_relocation@laen.org

Summary

Relocation: No
Telecommuting: Yes

Work Experience

Part of a team developing Nike's next-generation hosting environment for all of Nike's production, customer facing websites.

• Used puppet, rundeck, and other tools to manage large, high volume web environment with Akamai, Apache, and JBoss components.
• Designed and deployed Graphite/statsd based metrics collection environment to collect, correlate, display, monitor and alert on thousands of disparate metrics.
• Migrated services from high-cost managed hosting environment to self-managed Amazon AWS environemnt. Developed tools to be hosting provider agnostic.
• Integrated Elastic Beanstalk and other Amazon cloud services into our deploy processes.
• Wrote on-call notification and escalation system using ruby/sinatra, Twilio, and PagerDuty

July 2005 - August 2011
Sr. UNIX Systems Architect
Xerox, Inc
Xerox Office Group, Color Printer Engineering
Wilsonville, OR

• Supported mechanical, electrical, and software engineering customers.
• Commissioned and co-designed custom OpenSolaris-based storage systems to reduce NAS costs by 60-80%.
• Designed and wrote a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup system to backup 50TB fileservers in a 4 hour nightly window.
• Managed global network of Solaris (10, OpenSolaris, and OpenIndiana) and Linux (Fedora, SuSE, RedHat, Centos) machines to support Xerox's engineering organization.
• Wrote APIs to infrastructure and systems administration tasks to allow lower level sysadmins to more easily help out and business customers to help themselves when possible.
• Built Linux and Windows virtualization infrastructure using KVM, Xen, and VMWare ESX. Used Eucalypus API to form systems into a scriptable private cloud.
• Architected Linux and Solaris web cluster, containing Apache, Tomcat, and Ruby/RAILS servers with MySQL and Oracle backends.
• Designed centralized, revision controlled management, monitoring, and capacity planning infrastructure using git, cfengine, nagios, cacti, and collectd.
• Used puppet to better exchange configuration information and integrate with other engineering organizations.
• Setup and curated Mediawiki based intranet for engineering.
• Responsible for training and directing lower level sysadmins.

October 2004 - June 2005
UNIX Consultant
Adecco Technical, Inc on contract to Nike, Inc
Beaverton, OR

• Eight month staff augmentation contract.
• Managed Solaris 7, 8, and 9 systems to support Nike's B2B web portal.
• Supported ATG Dynamo, Weblogic, iPlanet Web Server, and Apache configurations, and software deploys.
• Built Nagios and RRDtool based monitoring and reporting system to provide the business with availability and quality of service reporting.

• Responsible (with three other root-level administrators) for all management functions for over 700 Debian Linux and Solaris servers.
• Centrally managed over 190 Linux iptables/netfilter firewalls using in-house rule generation scripts.
• Built and supported high-volume apache-based web hosting environment handling over 16 million hits a day.
• Wrote server virtualization software, using User-Mode Linux to host up to 30 virtual Linux systems on a single piece of hardware. Integrates virtual machine creation, execution, firewall rule generation, and other management functions.
• Wrote a centralized server management system to control provisioning, backups, monitoring, and firewalling. Reduced new server provisioning time to under five minutes.
• Designed and implemented geographically fault tolerant mail processing infrastructure to process several hundred thousand emails per day, filtering spam and removing viruses for thousands of users across dozens of companies.
• Weaved together several open source projects to create a "Spam Quarantine" system which intercepts spam prior to entering customer systems, and provides them with an easy to use and safe web interface for recovering and reporting misclassified spam.
• Built a 13 TB online storage automated backup system, reliably backing up all 700 machines on a nightly basis, with weeks of incrementals and long term archival of selected backup sets.

May 2001 - October 2002
Systems Administrator
GMx Technologies, Inc
Tampa, FL

• Managed small UNIX (Solaris and Debian Linux) and NT (Win2000, WinXP) network for technology startup.
  
• Supervised one root level system administrator.
• Implemented a shared UNIX and NT infrastructure
• Configured UNIX, NT, Web, and Jabber (instant-messaging) servers and clients to use a central LDAP server for authentication.
• Installed and configured NFS, Samba, and DAV servers to provide users shared home directories and project space.
• Set up small (under 50 customer) virtual hosting environment
  
• Set up IPSec based VPN system, providing secure remote access and allowing employees to telecommute.

• Performed high-level designs for suite of nine UNIX systems management products.
• Designed and implemented a Linux-based Appliance operating system for virtual machines on IBM s390 (zSeries) mainframes under z/VM or LPARs.
• Built "hercules" based build and development environment to simulate s390 mainframes.
• Built ARM-Linux development environment for Solaris 8 systems.
• Led a team of four developers in the construction of CM_SAFE™, UNIX configuration management and disaster recovery tool
• Authored and co-authored architectural documents design specifications, and whitepapers.
• Enforced "dev", "build", "test", and "production" environments, using user-mode-linux where possible, to allow efficient testing of applications.
• Co-developed iterative project management framework, allowing GMx to rapidly design and implement new features.
• Built ARM-Linux embedded systems development environment for Solaris 8 systems.

November 1999 - May 2001
Senior Systems Architect/Administrator
2nd Century Communications
Tampa, FL

• Grew ad-hoc 8 machine network into a unified 70 machine network (50 Solaris, 20 Linux) with one other UNIX admin in a "startup" environment.
• Performed team-lead duties, including writing objectives, prioritizing work, and making purchasing decisions.
• Introduced central management of Sun (Solaris 7, 2.6, 2.5.1) and Linux (Redhat 6.1, 6.2, Mandrake 7.0, 7.1, Debian 2.1, 2.2) boxen using cfengine and revision control of all relevant system configuration files with CVS.
• Built clustered environment where any system could take over the duties of any other system in under five minutes using SAN and NAS technology, cfengine, rsync, and in some cases Veritas Cluster Server. Using Jumpstart, cfengine, and automated restore scripts (Veritas NetBackup), machines could be completely reloaded and brought back into service in under 2 hours (and less than 15 minutes of sysadmin time).
• Managed security.
• Designed firewall, DMZ, and Extranet networks.
• Wrote distribution scripts that integrated CVS with rsync and ssh to maintain multiple redundant machines on DMZ that heal themselves in the event of security compromise.
• Deployed light weight intrusion detection software ("snort") to detect attacks and send alerts.
• Designed and deployed honeypot networks.
• Wrote scripts to lock services in chroot(2)ed "jails".
• Secondary Firewall admin for a pair of Checkpoint Firewall-1 firewalls running on Nokia hardware.
• Implemented system and service monitoring using netsaint, cricket, and logsurfer. Wrote service checking scripts to do end-to-end testing of critical services, and perform self-healing or paging if a fault was detected.
• Assisted in design and build-out of UNIX equipment supporting company's core ATM phone switches including call server, network management systems, and provisioning equipment.
• Supported three terabytes of storage consisting of MTI and EMC disk (managed by Veritas file system and logical volume manager), A1000/D1000 disk arrays, and Network Appliance filers.
• Designed and implemented small but highly scalable web farm.
• ..And much, much more! :)

Automated network administration of servers and desktops using "cfengine" and other tools with a focus on creating an easily duplicated, redundant environment in which any node can take over the responsibilities of any other node.
Duties and accomplishments:

• Managed environment consisting of over 120 Sun Solaris and a handful of Hewlett-Packard HP-UX systems with three other OS admins and 5 application support admins.
• Implemented system monitors (connectivity, and service availablity)
• Maintained CVS repositories to store system configuration information and track changes over time.
• Implemented software installation and distribution routines to distribute software to over 120 machines.
• Evaluated fibre channel disk arrays. Implemented two terabyte Data Warehousing application on an E4500 Sun Cluster using A5000s for shared disk.
• Developed pre-commit tools to verify data before commitment to CVS repositories.

• Owned (with two other root level sysadmins) a small network of 35 HPs running HP-UX 10.20 and 8 Suns running Solaris 2.6.
• Supported HP OpenView Network Node Manager, Seagate NerveCenter, and Informix, Sybase, and Oracle databases.
• Wrote fully automated system install scripts for HP-UX and Solaris
• Authored local security policies.
• Planned the migration from HP OmniBack to Vertias Netbackup.
• Built HP and Solaris public domain software environment.
• Built Solaris development environment.
• Planned capacity, suggested high availability solutions.
• Evaluated fileservers, RAID software/hardware, high availability options, and backup software/hardware.
• Traveled to remote Lucent sites to setup and configure systems.
• Wrote system monitoring software to gauge the health of the systems.
• Managed development and QA environments
• Interviewed and evaluated sysadmin candidates
• Designed and implemented a hierarchal YP/NIS system, allowing user accounts to be shared among NIS domains.

June 1997 - February 1998
Assistant System Engineer/System Support Engineer
Silicon Graphics / Cray Research
Portland, OR
Duties:

• Evaluated customer needs to provide hardware and software recommendations.
• Assisted sales representatives in determining customer needs.
• Assisted SGI's customers by debugging system problems and performing hardware, software, and operating system maintenance.
• Provided customers with software development support.
• Wrote software and scripts for duplicating and managing EFS format CDs.
• Designed network layout of new Portland SGI office, including purchasing recommendations for routers and switches.
• Maintained the Oregon SGI webpage, used to distribute software and diseminate information to local SGI customers.
• Wrote scripts for and helped debug IRIX autoinst (now RoboInst)

November 1994 - February 1998
UNIX Systems and Network Administrator
Portland State University (School of Engineering)
Portland, OR 97210
Duties and Accomplishments:

• Co-owned (with 3 other root level admins) approximately 110 machines, both Silicon Graphics systems running IRIX 6.3 and 6.2 and Sun systems running SunOS 4.1.x and Solaris 2.[3-6].
• Supported approximately 4000 users with a small group of root level sysadmins and several student user-support admins.
• Managed primary DNS maps for 15 sub domains, 27 networks, and about 5000 devices.
• Mentored incoming junior UNIX admins.
• Centrally managed DHCP and bootp services across 28 subnets in 10 buildings.
• Operated an NNTP server with a full USENET feed.
• Evaluated fileservers and disk arrays.
• Installed and upgraded software and operating systems.

May 1996 - November 1996
Customer Demo Room Administrator
Intel Corporation - Hawthorne Farms Campus
Hillsboro, Oregon 97124
Duties: Putting together and preparing machines for use as demos for customers, demonstrating products to customers, testing motherboards, testing software, hardware and software installs and maintenance, configuring systems, designing network structure, setting up a Windows NT server for a 10 machine network, setting up UNIX web servers, and writing a primitive content management system for facilitating internal document publication.

Projects

Skill Summary

Education