Click here to download .doc

Andy Singleton

Summary:

A skilled and experienced senior Linux engineer with over 14 years of experience in the IT industry. I have worked for various major blue-chip companies and in a large variety of team structures and data-centres.

My goal is to bring dedication, enthusiasm and knowledge to every project I work on. In my experience, communication is the key to achieving success in any project, and I try to maximize this whenever possible.

I specialize in Red Hat / Centos Linux but have experience of various other distributions and their associated software (Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE). For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I am qualified up to the most senior certification currently offered by Red Hat (RHCA).

My technical skills are complemented by “soft” skills which include team management, training/mentoring, project management and technical and non-technical presentation skills.

Skills Matrix:

Major Projects:

• HPC rollout of ~200 IBM Blades (HS20′s). Responsible for network design, OS image, kernel tuning, and kickstart rollout.

• Upgrade of ~300 RHEL4 servers to RHEL6. This involved deploying (with Red Hat Services) a multi-tier Satellite installation with “meta-rpms”. This was a multipath boot-from-san implementation which also included Oracle RAC servers.
• Installation of Kerberos, LDAP, and FreeIPA to provide a Single-Sign-On service for an entire Unix infrastructure (~400+ nodes, RHEL4, 5, 6, and Solaris). Involved NFS, Kerberos for Windows, and group-based restriction of host and sudo access.

Accreditations:

• BSc (hons) Computer Science – Staffordshire University
• Red Hat certifications: RHCSA, RHCE, RHCDS, RHCA. (RHEL5 and 6)

Contract History:

Queen Mary University of London, July 2012 – January 2013

• Satellite and Puppet installation ~600 machines
• Personal student QEMU/KVM management tool (for multiple personal desktop instances)
• Nagios / Icinga implementation
• Migration of equipment database from MySQL to PostgreSQL

Wordtracker.com: Linux/Open Source Consultancy, June 2012 (2 days)

• Investigate and document critical issues with current Puppet installation.
• Provide a documented path for Puppet upgrade.
• Install a replacement Puppetmaster and integrate existing Puppet code.

Tipp24 Operating Services: Senior Linux Administrator, Feb 2009 – Apr 2012

• Long-term contract, project implementation position.
• “Single Sign On” project: Provide AD-like authentication services for Unix infrastructure using Kerberos, LDAP, and freeIPA.
• Centralized Logging project: Use rsyslog and syslog-ng to transfer all system / httpd / router / java logs to highly available logging servers.
• “Xerox” installation project: Implementation of multi-tier, multi-site Red Hat Satellite installation.
• Datacenter redesign project: Re-installation of production environment on new hardware and new technology implementations (RHEL6, boot-from-san),
• Puppet rollout project: Introduced company to puppet and setup initial environments, services, and scope.
• Other minor projects: Documentation conversion, OCS/GLPI, rdate to NTP implementation.
• Various heartbeat, DRBD, LVS, ha-proxy, and ldirector implementations.
• Internal and External DNS maintenance and engineering (TinyDNS)
• Extensive HP server support: hardware installation, IO accelerator cards, driver compilation, iLO maintenance.

Cardif Pinnacle Insurance (BNP Paribas): Linux Administrator, May 2008 – Aug 2008

• Fixed term contract to cover permanent recruitment
• RedHat core 4 & 5, Satellite Server, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Samba, DNS, NFS, DHCP, user account, and package administration
• Produced an FTP/SCP/SFTP data feed with Perl/PHP web interface
• MySQL administration, replication, and monitoring
• Maintenance of production, testing and development environments

Bank of America: Web Administrator, Oct 2007 – Mar 2008

• Project role attached to Security Services firewall team
• Provided load-balancing / web-server support and consultancy for 6 DB/WebSphere/SunONE/BigIP customer facing application environments
• Performed IIS, BIG-IP, and SunONE administration, scale, and load testing
• Installed and configured F5 BIG-IP WebAccelerator and Enterprise Manager products over multiple environments

GIST Logistics: Linux Engineer, Jun 2007 – Sep 2007

• Deployed VMware RedHat instances for WebLogic application tier
• Creating and deploying Vmware templates and instances
• Provided BAU support of all company Linux environments
• Created and documented RedHat “standard build” and “custom build” scripts
• Standardized ~80% of Linux application tier

Colt Telecommunications: Senior Linux Engineer, Jan 2007 – May 2007

• Project Unix resource for flagship customer-facing web application
• Single point of contact between project team and Unix team
• Member of “environment provisioning” and testing teams
• Lead developer of Perl data feed (sub-project)
• Red Hat and HPUX administration
• Apache, NFS, bash, Perl, sendmail, kernel installation and configuration

HSBC: Senior Linux Engineer, Aug 2006 – Dec 2006

• Dropped in to high pressure role as emergency resource
• Project work entailed design and implementation of production, UAT and DR environments
• SuSE (SLES 10) environment with Samba, NFS, NIS, NFS, NAS administration
• Veritas Cluster Server design, implementation and maintenance

Previous Employment History (non-contract):

Morse Group: Senior Systems Engineer (Aug ’06 – May ’07)

Inpharmatica: Senior Production Systems Engineer (Nov ’01 – Jul ’06)

Various e-commerce start-ups: Linux Administrator (2000 – 2001)

Fraser Williams: Support Engineer (1998  – 1999)

Personal Interests:

I spend a lot of time doing the following: playing computer games, reading, watching films, raising a family, playing with technology, and practising martial arts. So far I have accumulated a black-belt in TaeKwonDo, and a blue-belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I also ice skate.