Location: Isle of Dogs, Docklands, London, UK. Frequent visits to datacentres in Docklands.
Core Roles/Skills: Linux system administration, building core and customer managed server hardware, on-site customer leased-line installations, network administration, administration of all online customer services (Exim, Apache, BIND, QPopper, ProFTPD etc.), monitoring (in-house solution/MRTG/RRD/SNMP), ad-hoc automation scripting, out of hours on-call cover.
I worked in the core Network Operations Centre team of six in London Docklands, managing and maintaining all aspects of core servers, services and network infrastructure. We exclusively used Linux on our servers (primarily Red Hat 6.0 through to Red Hat 8.0), which helped me develop strong Linux administration skills. I also learned to configure Lucent/Ascend NAS (Network Access Server) hardware and Cisco 1600 & 3600 series routers. My Cisco router knowledge played an essential role during configuration of leased line installations while visiting customer offices. During my time at Frontier I developed an appreciation of the Exim MTA and MySQL, and how to integrate them into highly flexible and performant mail routing and delivery farm. Other responsibilities included server provisioning (from building server hardware, to installing and configuring both operating systems and hosted applications and services), CGI application development, ad-hoc systems automation programming in Perl + shell scripting, and 24 hour out of hours on-call for network emergencies.