Adam Auden

scruffy looking *nix herder


A Linux Administrator
living in Nashville, TN

I'll get 'em in, what are you having?

Profile

Systems Engineer at Moontoast, LLC
Information Technology and Services | Greater Nashville Area, US

Summary

I am a UNIX systems administrator with over 10 years of experience in a wide variety of industries and business settings, with skills predominantly in Linux. I have in-depth experience in managing change in high availability environments and in maintaining large scale installations, working either individually or as part of a team.
Specialties: Linux (Redhat and other), Backups (Symantec Veritas Netbackup) and Storage.

Experience

  • Sept 2011 - Present
    Systems Engineer / Moontoast, LLC
    At Moontoast I provide resilience. redundancy, reliability and scalability to our customers. I also make fantastic coffee.
  • Mar 2009 - Sept 2011
    Manager, Network & Systems / Bondware, Inc.
    Reporting directly to the CEO, I was responsible for all aspects of IT and production systems within the company. I managed web hosting, backups, email, and DNS for hundreds of client sites and carried out all required system administration tasks. I provided technical assistance and troubleshooting to our support staff and developers for any systems, application, database, and network problems that arose.

    Bondware was based on a LAMP platform running on CentOS which I standardized to common versions and configurations. It was hosted in both a traditional data center environment and within Amazon’s web services platform, using load balanced clusters in both environments along with MySQL replication for redundancy, scaling, and backup purposes.

    I deployed and managed a Nagios monitoring environment incorporating escalations and service dependencies with some custom plug-in development for MySQL process monitoring. Additionally, I implemented an off-site backup regime based around rsync to provide for business continuity in case of any catastrophic event in the office or data center environments.

    In addition to my systems role, I was also involved in product development for both Bondware Web Solutions and the Renderosity Digital Marketplace team. Whilst collaborating with my colleagues to develop and test ideas for products and features for these business units I gained insight into the decision making process involved. I learned about selecting ideas for development and how the feature specifications are formed, acquiring a good overview of the interactions between sales, support, development, and operations within the organization.
  • Sept 2007 - Jul 2008
    Systems Administrator / Inspired Gaming Group
    Supported the server infrastructure behind an estate of over 30,000 entertainment and gaming machines.

    Managed data center servers running RHEL3/4 using Satellite Server, providing custom packages to install in-house and third party software.

    Migration to VMWare ESX server based instances and Dell Blade centers.

    Maintained the Tomcat cluster and standalone servers; deployment, upgrading and maintenance of in-house and third party software.

    Provided the content distribution using Marimba (now BMC Configuration Management), and network services to the estate: redundant SMTP (Exim), DNS (BIND) and network time (NTP) servers, all monitored using Nagios.

    Maintained development and staging environment providing clear separation between these and production to ensure consistency for our software testers.

    Involved in the change process, not only carrying out approved works but also advising on technical aspects of changes and the effects they may have on the business.
  • Sept 2007 - Jul 2008
    Systems Administrator / Inspired Broadcast Networks
    See Inspired Gaming Group for details.
  • Jul 2007 - Sept 2007
    Systems Administrator / Fotango
    As part of the systems team at Fotango I primarily supported the server infrastructure hosting the internal services and those of their parent company Canon. These were high availability web applications provided through a redundant, load balanced, open source platform covered by 24/7 monitoring via a set of Nagios installations.

    Additionally I supported the infrastructure for the development, testing and staging environments for the development team, maintaining version control and build systems consistent with the production environments.
  • Mar 2003 - Jul 2007
    Senior Systems Administrator / The Moving Picture Company
    At MPC I supported a wide range of users including administrative staff, technical staff, artists, production staff and developers. I provided R&D of new technologies, the higher level sysadmin work and training for other staff.

    Working with a team of eleven I supported a range of Linux workstations, render nodes and network servers, learning much about managing large networks and the tools used.

    Systems availability was paramount to this 24/7 operation requiring my coordination with production staff for service outages and a clear understanding of how services affected the business.

    Backup and archiving were a large part of my role and I designed, built and managed a Veritas Netbackup Enterprise system to replace the existing backup and archive facilities. Based around Quantum PX720 with SDLT600 drives it initially archived 5TB of data per week and backed up 55TB of data across the organization but was designed to scale as the business grew.
  • Mar 2003 - Jul 2007
    Senior Systems Engineer / MPC
    See entry for The Moving Picture Company.
  • Sept 2002 - Mar 2003
    UNIX Systems Administrator / Imperial College London
    I supported the operating environments for a number of large Oracle databases used by the finance and administration wings of the College.

    These ran on a range of Sun hardware including Enterprise 3500 - 6500 and SunFire 12K and platforms based around Veritas Volume Manager and Solstice Disk Suit giving me exposure to a high availability production environment and experience of the downtime scheduling and change management that entails.
  • Jun 2000 - Jun 2002
    Network Administrator / Profero
    Initially responsible for the UK office network and related network services my role broadened as the company grew to include other offices worldwide and I implemented a VPN and related infrastructure to connect satellite offices back to the UK.

    The company's production banner-ad servers and associated hardware also fell under my remit. This gave me experience working in a mission critical production environment, along with the considerations that have to be taken into account when maintaining and upgrading such a system.

Education

  • 1997 - 2000
    Imperial College London
    BEng in Computing
  • 1992 - 1997
    Bromsgrove
    A-Levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics & Chemistry

Additional Information

Photos

Favorites

Posts

Posts

November 12, 10:27 AM
Tim O'Reilly on Mac OS X: "its tendency to hide affordances that were once a joy to the advanced user"

-- I think Tim nailed it there. Moves like making the Library file hidden are there for the growing user base of non-Power Users. Making that directory not easily accessible by default means people are less likely to break things if they don't know what they're doing.

If can be unhidden if you need it regularly, or you can get to it through the Finder Go To Folder menu. I found it puzzling that it was gone, initially, but I understand that the OS X audience is broadening and that we're going to see changes because of that. I think we're going to to have to go a very long way, however, before I see Windows or Linux as a better desktop or portable option.
May 13, 03:29 PM

So, in an effort to do something about my cholesterol I'm thinking about how to reduce my meat, dairy and egg intake as much as I can. To this end:

Dear Lazyweb,

Where is a good place for a life-long carnivore to find a gentle introduction to meat-free/vegan cooking?

Thanks!

Adam.

Any thoughts, suggestions, etc. would be much appreciated.

March 30, 01:15 PM

In a recent email from Klout:

Hi adamauden,

Since you've got Klout, 20th Century Fox would like you to be one of the first to receive the movie poster for Mr. Popper's Penguins. You will also be able to watch Seaworld San Diego's penguins get the first look at the film's trailer (super cute).

...

P.S. We think this is a valuable perk for our users. Let us know if you have any feedback.


Seriously??

February 15, 12:47 PM


This year I'm helping out with Podcamp Nashville, an online media unconference for anyone who wants to share ideas, hear from industry leaders, and participate in discussions and demonstrations related to creating digital content. It’s a forum for bloggers, marketers, content creators, educators, social media socialites, podcasters and the like to gather, network and learn about the latest trends, tricks and technologies.

It's happening Saturday, March 26 at Cadillac Ranch (305 Broadway, Nashville, TN). There will also be an after party (details pending) so hopefully I'll see you there for a brew! :)
December 26, 12:27 PM

So, I've been watching Buffy Season 1, having not seen it back when it all came out (I know, I know). So, Buffy/Angel fanatics out there, cast your eyes across these episode lists:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/211562.html
http://buffyfest.blogspot.com/2009/04/buffyangel-episode-watching-guide.html

Does that seem like a reasonable order for watching both shows in tandem?

Thanks, hope you had a merry Christmas!

A.

November 21, 03:06 PM

Lazy Saturday
Originally uploaded by Adam Auden
This is what I see for a good portion of my weekends. Peaceful. I've not been sharing Instagram photos on Flickr or LJ, but I really liked how this one turned out. Particularly the textures it captured.
November 15, 10:10 PM

Not that LJ should notice all that much, but I'm taking a break from my online distractions as they're rather starving my attention to other things. If you want to get in touch please use email or my cell.

November 11, 09:17 AM
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.



From Ode of Rememberance, part of For the Fallen.
September 08, 02:05 PM

An interesting selection of posts on Women in Technology, via Felicia Day:



and apparently Michael Arrington of Techcrunch stirred this up a while back too, although the Jolie O'Dell post was from before that.

As father to a daughter I would dearly love see go into some deeply geeky field (and thus, no doubt, will rebel and major in poetry), I find the points surrounding influence, in the formative years and from a persons peers, most interesting.
August 16, 10:58 AM

Sharpie Liquid Pencil
Originally uploaded by Adam Auden
My first test of the new Sharpie Liquid Pencil, a box of which just arrived from the lovely people at Amazon. So far, I like it. Will have to see if the writing looks any smoother once it has been broken in a bit.
June 24, 07:51 AM
Madness as ever at an Apple launch event. Much like my iPad I'll be back around 3pm or so to collect my reserved phone.

Pre-orders were actually a longer line at this point, however walk-ins had gone ahead by the time I left.

See also the front of the line.
May 19, 10:57 AM


The ping is coming from inside the house!!
April 20, 02:30 PM

Anyone trying to get from US to UK or vice versa; Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself on twitter) has chartered a flight from Newark-London-Newark http://bit.ly/dSga7

February 14, 05:35 PM

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

September 08, 05:10 PM


A message I'm sure we can call get behind.
July 23, 05:49 PM

So, does this mean the federal govt. is going to achieve even less until the next round of elections? *facepalm*

July 23, 05:44 PM

Wow, arctic Britain: http://bit.ly/5WSYDs

July 23, 05:42 PM

Distincly lacking in Va Va Voom.

January 18, 10:47 AM

Haiti, What not to donate: http://bit.ly/8w4yB4

July 23, 05:38 PM

Does IPv6 support Quality of Content (QoC)? I'd like to block all packets from internet douche-bags at my border router.

July 23, 05:38 PM

Merry 2010 GMT-6, and the rest of you. :)

July 23, 05:35 PM

wonders why tailgating drivers are so hugely surprised when he applies his brakes. Stopping distance not a concept taught in Drivers Ed?

July 23, 05:34 PM

Merry Christmas Y'all!

December 23, 01:37 AM

Epic, just epic.

July 23, 05:34 PM

Bloody hell, I saw this happen in my rear-view on the way to work this morning. Scary. http://bit.ly/514Wwe

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