User:Kieran.whitbread

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1 What Kieran Whitbread Has Been Up To
2 Career
3 Skills
4 Kieran Whitbread and This wiki

What Kieran Whitbread Has Been Up To

Daemonising iostat

Getting over farcebook . If you've had enough you need this link: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Squid log analysis with calamaris, squid-snmp, transcoding with ffmpeg and mencoder, playing with SpamAssassin

IPMI Thermal Sensors

Web caching with squid, graphing with Cacti and Net SNMP, virus scanning with ClamAV and generally mucking around with CentOS 5 (e.g. Kickstart.

Creating accessible, progressive Javascript Tabs and stopping spam with ReCaptcha

Writing lots of javascript, including animate things (which I hate). Lots of mad, mad css. Building the god site with eZ Publish.

Blocking brute force attacks with fail2ban

AWstats, Disk images and mount points for OS X

Virtual Box virtualisation from Sun, very nice, free, a lot like VMWare and has a powerful API and commandline interface you can use too. I've been using it to run Linux and Windows on Mac - plus I've moved all of my windows test machines over to it. So far so good.

The latest toys are Redmine and Ruby on Rails on apache/Linux, I need better project management and tracking. (I've been loosing a lot of hair). My new favourite project tool is TaskJuggler - it's very powerful, just unfortunately doesn't let people collaborate that easily.

There's also some stuff about VSFTPD, which I hope to expand on soon.

Other small things include setting up a DNS zone with Maradns - it's only for a development network and not for public use. Maradns did a nice job and is really quick and easy to set up.

I'm still documenting my Linux based Virtual Domains & Virtual Users Email Server with anti-spam, anti-virus, database backed accounts and web mail. I think you'll like it, if you're in to that sort of thing ;). I set up an Email Gateway last year, and so the new system was just the next phase of evolution.

I'm also playing with Cacti and always doing lots of things with web servers -- I need write up some more of my apache recipes.

Career

Kieran is a Systems Administrator / Developer for Queen Mary College www.qmul.ac.uk where he tries to draw pretty pictures and play with spiders and other bugs.

Before that, he worked as a Developer and System Administrator for Hum Interactive (www.huminteractive.com) building web sites and taking care of hosting.

Some examples of Kieran's web work (hosting, programming, custom framework and cms, markup, css, flash, database, hosting, javascript. i.e. everything except graphic design):

www.foodforfriends.com
www.mindcombat.co.uk
www.huminteractive.com
www.otehallfarm.co.uk
www.tlcovencleaning.co.uk
www.beerpiper.co.uk
www.lewescarvaleting.co.uk
www.overheard.huminteractive.com
www.greenescapes.co.uk

You can see a lot of my writing on the hum site, too.

He used to work for Varndean College, it's where he cut his teeth. Five years on a large academic network will do that to you. At Varndean, he brought about the linux revolution and touched everything from front line support to networks, hosting, infrastructure, authentication and god knows what. If he wasn't developing an application, building a server, administering a service or putting in a new firewall then he was crawling under someone's desk looking for a loose network cable.

Skills

(likes to think he is good at...)

At the moment Kieran likes to work on Mac and Linux but can be convinced to use Windows with MS Services for Unix, Xming, Putty and VMWare/Virtual Box.

Before you start to think of him as a Microsoft hater, Kieran Whitbread has done some Clever Stuff with Windows.

Kieran really loves to bring it all together with tools like WAMP, UnixODBC and FreeTDS so you can have the best of both worlds.

Kieran Whitbread and This wiki

Kieran started this wiki off in something like 2005 at Varndean as documentation tool for the IT department. It soon filled up with all kinds of notes. Some of the content won't really make sense out of context and he's working his way through deleting all of that stuff. What remains should be useful technical references for anyone, although the real purpose of this wiki is to be a "Brain Share" for the old Varndean IT staff.

You can see his contributions but please note anything from 23 June 2008 to 30 June 2008 was administration work, Kieran may or may not have created those pages originally

(this old photo is by Green Haddock)

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