User:Kieran.whitbread

Views:

1 What Kieran Whitbread Has Been Up To
- 1.1 The QMUL Days
- 1.2 The Hum Days
2 Career
3 Skills
4 Education
5 Kieran Whitbread and This wiki

What Kieran Whitbread Has Been Up To

The QMUL Days

Finding out what you can get away with using SQLite. Trying to cope with the shear volume of IO caused by a Cacti server with ~90K data-sources. Getting/setting facls on Solaris and Linux (yes, I've never done this on those operating systems before). Becoming an OpenLdap beginner. Upgrading two mail relays, built from the excellent work of my colleagues. Seeing a big project complete smoothly. Appreciating what 'high volume' means and putting it in to context. Ditto Collegiality. Ditto Politics in the Workplace. Insights in to bacula. Scripting nagios.

Python programming and attempting generate Cacti data and graph templates automatically.

Packaging SpamAssassin, ClamAV, re2c and Exim. Wondering why I've only just started using rpmbuild. Setting up an Exim server. More Cacti.

Setting up two SpamAssassin servers, with MySQL, pyzor, caching BIND dns server.

Adding services to Nagios and writing checks. Getting used to Bacula

Learning how to make RPMs and learning how not to get bitten by bash.

Writing plsql functions in [http://www.postgresql.org PostgreSQL.

Returning to ArchLinux after 3 years and being very happy again. Fiddling with DBUS and LCD Backlights and controlling my laptops volume using the function keys.

Trying to give back: Cacti Spine snmp clientaddr support; patch unchecked pointer in squid htcp.

Creating (or replacing) scripts and templates for Cacti to graph iostats, squid, cpu usage, Dell OSM data, IPMI sensor data, APC UPS statistics and plenty of other bits and pieces.

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 - update: after a month I find that my account is still there and facebook didn't delete it. My life is over.

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.

The Hum Days

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. He works on the Central Servers team, part of IT Services http://www.its.qmul.ac.uk/facilities.html.

While learning more than he ever did studying with the OU, Kieran contributes in varying degrees to central web hosting, user management, email systems, monitoring/reporting, the data centre and many other services provided by the Central Servers team.

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):

It has been some time since I've had any involvement in any of these sites I'm not going to check if these sites are still the same or hosted on servers that I set up.

www.orionbooks.co.uk (not involved in completion)
www.foodforfriends.com
www.mindcombat.co.uk
www.huminteractive.com
www.otehallfarm.co.uk
www.beerpiper.co.uk
www.lewescarvaleting.co.uk
www.overheard.huminteractive.com
www.greenescapes.co.uk

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, but probably a novice, 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.

Education

There's not been any pretending about the OU for a long time. Kieran is not a student any more but he wants to go back and study these:

In the meantime he's learning plenty from man pages, experiences, C How to Program, the LPI track and many many web sites including online manuals and books.

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)

Retrieved from "http://wiki.ninjafocus.net/User:Kieran.whitbread"