|
I graduated with an Associates degree in electrical engineering in 1972 from Monroe County Community College.
The war in Vietnam was in full swing and student enrollments at state universities were way down. Our entire electrical
engineering graduating class, all 8 of us, convinced Lake Superior State College (now a university) to transfer all our
credits in exchange for 8 new recruits into their BSEE program. They met that offer and topped it off with an Associates
degree in Computer Engineering through use of technical electives. That was a deal none of us could turn down.
I had pre-arranged an interview with NCR while I was still at Monroe CCC, they offered me an entry level Electrical
Designer position with their Retail System Division in Cambridge Ohio. They started me out doing the typical EE intern
jobs, drafting, harness design, component selection and printed circuit board design. Having designed and built a
triggered oscilloscope from scratch as my sophomore project, all this was familiar work.
I was selected to manage all out of house PC design traveling extensively to PC design companies doing design reviews
and quality assurance. I was offered a Sr. PC designer and QA lead with a PC design company in Southfield Michigan.
This was my first exposure to CAD, Computer Aided Design. To make a long story short, I spent the next 13 years
managing CAD systems and teaching PC, IC and mechanical design to electrical and mechanical engineers. I administered CAD
systems for such companies as NCR, Control Data Corp., Rockwell International, AT@T and Snapper Power
Equipment. I have also taught CAD at the University of Lowell in Lowell MA and Athens Area Technical College in Athens GA.
CAD admin jobs were few and far between, so in 1988 I decided to switch to UNIX system administration. I was hired
to take Snapper Power Equipment from pencil and paper to the state of the art CAD engineering world. I selected
Comptervisions CADDS4 system which was run on Sun Microsystems MC68020 work stations. Our network consisted
of ½ inch coaxial cable, transevers and fang taps. Ah, the good old days. I also began my obsession with programming
during this time. VARPRO, PAREX, these are languages long forgotten but they were a great way to cut ones teeth and
polish ones programming skills. I was also scripting bourn, C and korn shell for system backups, file system maintenance
and other tedious administration jobs.
I broke completely away from the CAD world in 1992 when I took a position with HBO and Company in the UNIX
Migration Group. Our job was to prepare hospitals across the country to transition their patient care, pharmacy,
radiology and financial system from a proprietary Data General system to HP-UX, AIX or DGUX systems. We sized
the systems, worked with the OEM on system installation, oversaw the network installation, which consisted of banks
of terminal servers, installed the OS, striped the arrays and migrated the existing applications to the new platform.
My biggest client was Kennestone hospital in Marietta GA. They offered me the position of hospital wide UNIX system
administrator. I managed 4 large HP 9000 systems with 200+ terminals and 3200+ users. I created an entire suite
of ksh programs to automate every aspect of managing this extensive environment. User administration, printer
administration, CPU monitoring, batch job control, application monitors etc. The entire "application" could be operated
on the command line or driven by an ascii based menuing system I created specifically for Kennestone. I even wrote my own
paging system to send numeric pages when problems raised. This was before any commercial paging system was available.
My next big evolution came in 1994 when I worked for Bellsouth
Cellular in the UNIX Applications Support Group. This was my first
exposure to a data center that was not completely of my own design. We
had 8 to 10 admins supporting some 15 applications running on 60
servers of various types. HP, SUN, AIX even some NCR systems. Batch
jobs everyware, screen scraping application interfaces, call center
sales staff, retail store order entry systems, every system
administrator?s nightmare. The day?s business could not begin until all
nightly batch jobs were verified, switch tape loads were done and
billing cycles were complete. I began my contribution to this mess by
writing a support log application and oncall rotation system. I
replaced the shift change physical oncall pager handoff with a virtual
oncall pager that changed with the oncall rotation. Post-it notes and
out the door verbal communications were replace with an extensive
support log application I created. Paging alerts run from cron jobs
monitored every application and critical system task. I discovered HTTP
and CGI. No more scripts from a tty terminal. No more telnet. I could
do all this with a browser interface from any work station on the
intronet. Since then I have written literly hundreds of CGIs for use
with system and application interfaces, SQL based report generators,
sales tool applications, WEB traffic reporting tools, SAR report
interfaces, it goes on and on. My introduction to the World Wide Web came at Bellsouth.net in
1997. I worked in the web hosting group where we automated the creation
of dozens of virtual shared web sites and stand alone dedicated sites
each day. We used Netscape Enterprise and Commerce servers. I also
created an application to collect SAR data from 77 HP, SUN, AIX and SGI
unix servers in 12 states to a central location with a CGI based report
generator including gnuplot graphs of CPU utilization. It was here I
was introduced to expect scripting. This language is the human emulated
counterpart of a system administrator. With it you can FTP hundreds of
files from any number of servers with total confidence, drive a menu
based application on a remote system changing the scripts behavior
based upon current conditions. Expect, the systems administrators best
friend. I also wrote my first large scale, non admin based application.
It was used to collect and report HTTP traffic for yp.bellsouth.com,
the real yellowpages on line. It was originally written in ksh and
later re-written in perl.
Since then I have worn two professional hats. That of Sr. UNIX system administrator with an emphasis on tool
design in a data center environment and WEB master for Netscape, Apache, SWS (Sun Web Server), SilverStream,
SiteServer and Zeus web servers. I have also developed a system operations user environment with template scripts
integrated with cron logging and paging alert functions, and SCCS wrappers for source control.
In the past 29 years in this industry I believe I have been creative, innovative, dependent on standardization and
documentation.
|