NickP’s World

Name: Nicholas A. B. Penney

Address:     ***hidden***
Telephone: 07999 438812 (mobile)
Email:         nicholas.penney@gmail.com

Profile

I am a technical consultant/senior Unix system administrator with an extensive knowledge of design, management and planning of distributed Unix client/server installations.  I have  considerable hands-on experience, gained in banking and retail organisations.  I specialise in project planning and the day-to-day management of installations in multi-vendor environments.  I especially enjoy the challenge of the day-to-day production support roles as they provide a rapid turnover of work and an often unpredictable and varied daily routine.

Skills

Solaris (all versions SunOS 4 through Solaris 10), Redhat Linux, AIX, On-line Disk Suite (ODS), Solaris Volume Manager (SVM), Logical Volume Manager (LVM), Veritas Volume Manager (VVM), Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) , Sun Cluster, Shell scripting (using Bourne, Korn, C-shell, POSIX, bash), Perl scripting, C programming, NetBackup, Legato, OmniBack II and other standard backup tools, DNS, NIS, Kerberos, NFS, TCP/IP and the DNS management tool QIP.

Career Synopsis

Applications Support Technician, Canterbury City Council, May 2009 – Aug 2009

I was brought in, temporarily, to carry out the daily workload of the existing two unix administrators that were both on long-term sick leave. My brief was to improve the reliability of the current overnight processing of the payments, billing and reporting for the housing system. I was also tasked with automating as much as possible of the on-going daily manual processing that was being carried out by the administrators against the housing system.

The overnight processing was failing on an almost nightly basis, and when it did run successfully it ran for over four hours. The failing system was causing many daily delays in processing of new housing applications and payments and updates to existing housing clients as the on-line daily transactions had to be delayed until successful completion of the overnight processing. By the time that I left CCC, the system ran the overnight processing in approximately 20-25 minutes and had not failed for over 7 weeks. Also all of the manual daily processing had been automated so that staff were able to concentrate on more productive tasks.

Working on Solaris 10 and utilising korn shell, ruby and perl scripting.

System Administrator, Goldman Sachs, February 2006 – Nov 2008

I was initially a member of a 4 person support team responsible for the day-to-day support of over 2500 Unix servers running all versions of Sun’s OS from Solaris 2.6 through Solaris 10 and Redhat Linux in a 50/50 split.  Merged after 1 year with the Trading Systems Unix team and then became a member of an 11 person team responsible for over 3500 servers.  The main infrastructure components worked on in GS include SANs, NIS, Legato Netbackup, AutoSys, HP Openview, Opsware and Hawk and the hardware ranges in use were from Sun Ultra 1 through E6800′s and Hewlett Packard HP DL385 and DL585 and BL460c blades.

Extensively involved in an on-going program of OS upgrades and took part in the planning of, and execution, of regular BCP/DR testing and full building power-downs.

Responsible for the roll-out of a kerberised version of OpenSSH to the whole of the London non-trading systems (approx. 1,000) servers and the roll-out of the Openview client to the whole of the London trading and non-trading environments.

Career Break, October 2005 – January 2008

Took this time off between contracts to relocate family and home from Portsmouth to Kent and to recover form a serious bout of illness.

System Administrator, Commerzbank, April 2005 – September 2005

Took over the day-to-day and overnight support of all production, test and development servers allowing the existing Unix team members to dedicate their time to an internal project tmoving the whole of the London IT systems and services over to Germany.  I was one of two System administrators looking after over 400 Sun Unix servers, ranging from Netra-T1′s, E420′s, V880′s, E6800′s  and E10Ks, along with 8 Clariion SANS and two L700 tape silos.

A large part of the environment I was responsible for was made up of 2 and 4-node VCS clusters (including 4 x E10K’s).  The main infrastructure components being used in this environment were NIS+, open-ldap, AutoSys and Veritas NetBackup.  Almost all of the servers made  use of Veritas Volume Manager along with Veritas File System.

All hardware installations, replacements and upgrades including CPU’s, disks, memory, network and HBA’s, along with SAN disks, were carried out directly by myself or other members of the Unix team, without the use of Sun engineers, due to local policy decisions.

System Administrator, ING Barings, March 2001 – March 2005

Working as one of three senior System Administrators in a 10 member support Team I was responsible for the day-to-day and overnight support of between 200 and 450 Sun Unix servers, including 6 E10K’s and making extensive use of Baydel 5 and Baydel 2000 arrays.
I implemented SSH across all of ING’s Unix servers in London. I was responsible for specification of and building a standard, secure build of Solaris 8 that was then rolled out to over 95% of the existing London based servers in ING.

Was the architect and implementation resource for the rapid upgrade of the existing HR systems from a single E450 onto a combination of two E4800’s, two E450’s and four Netra’s, allowing for a timely roll-out of a new “self-management” HR system.  I introduced flash archives as a means of rapid jumpstart builds and I standardised many daily processes, by means of scripting and installed, configured and upgraded BoKS/Keon for administration of user and user-access.  I also regularly helped out the security group resolving Keon problems and setting up unusual Keon access.

System Administrator, Credit Suisse First Boston, June 1999 – 12th January, 2001

Was responsible for the day-to-day support of over 400 back office Sun and HP Unix servers and from August 2000 to leaving had been the deputy Team Leader.  Projects I had been responsible for included installing an eight Server OmniBack II solution utilising 2 large ATL tape silos, and installed and/or upgraded a combination of over 50 4500’s/6500’s/420 & Netra servers for various banking applications.  I had also upgraded the main equities clearing system from HP-UX9 onto 11.0 whilst physically upgrading the hardware from D250/K260s to K580s and carried out most of the preparation to migrate onto N-Class servers. I was responsible for the 24×7 cover of the systems (both Development and Production) using remote access as required.

Unix Consultant, Union Bank of Switzerland, June 1996 – 30th April, 1999

Carried out an IP migration of 150+ HP and Sun Unix servers along with all desktop clients accessing the servers.  Managed the DNS service for the whole of the London TCP/IP based network.  Transferred to the Production Support Group in December 1996 primarily to implement a centralised administration server for the Unix systems and improve the security of the Unix systems.  This has been achieved in many ways including introduction of root passwords that are automatically changed on a daily basis and strict auditing of existing systems.

Carried out very successful migrations of Futures, Settlement and Equities based systems from Hewlett Packard (HP) T500’s running HP-UX 9.0 to HP K370 and K260 systems running HP-UX 10.20 and utilising the latest in AutoRaid disk technology.  These systems have databases ranging from 8 to 60 GB in size and were all migrated with no significant outage to the business.

Took over as the Unix Team Leader in October 1997, managing all aspects of the day-to-day running of the group including workload scheduling, supervision of junior members and liaison with the Services Manager and Project Managers, whilst maintaining a strong hands-on presence.

Post UBS/WDR merger, responsible for managing the decommissioning of more than 200 applications/servers in a controlled manner allowing for guaranteed recoverability should the need arise.  This has included close contact with all areas of the business to enable collection of undocumented application and server knowledge, such as interconnectivity and dependencies.

Technical Director, MegaNet Internet Services Limited, 1995 – 1997

Set up, as a partner/director, a new company as an Internet Service Provider.  This involved the setting up and configuration of all required systems (firewall/dial-up router, DNS, Mail, Web, USENET news and FTP servers) running under HP and SCO Unix and Windows NT.  Considerable configuration of the Mail server, running the HP-UX 10.20 version of sendmail was required, in order to run a POP3 mail facility as well as the usual SMTP based mail.

Designed and built a package of Windows and Unix (Linux) based software for customer use to access the Internet services.  Ran the help desk for all access/software installation problems, including out of hour’s support.

The company was wound up at the end of 1997 having decided that it could not compete financially with the many new and well-funded ISP’s such as Virgin Net.

Unix Technical Consultant, J Sainsbury plc, 1988-1995

A member of the Technical Planning Group developing long term corporate strategies, having responsibility for the project planning and implementation of a distributed, store based Unix sales based ordering and forecasting system.  Responsibility for project planning and implementation of a depot based Unix stock management system.  Provided all required co-ordination between technical development and support teams.  Involved in the system design and implementation of putting an HP based Unix server in every branch (450+) as well as the day-to-day support of them.  Responsible for the design and production of a non-interactive utility to install and/or update the operating system & applications for use by non-technical branch staff.

I was one of a three-man team responsible for the implementation of the original Sainsbury’s wine-direct e-commerce site, utilising the Netscape Commerce server and an in-house designed and coded ‘shopping-trolley’ system.

Trainee COBOL Programmer, British Oxygen Corporation (BOC), 1988-1988

A junior member of a team of developers developing stock control and payroll systems using a combination of mainframe IBM COBOL and IBM assembler and Structured programming techniques.  Promoted to programmer after 6 weeks.

Sergeant, Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers, HM Forces (Army), 1978-1987

Worked through the ranks as an Avionics Technician attached to the Army Air Corps.  Attaining the rank of sergeant I was responsible for a team of 8-12 junior ranks carrying out support and maintenance of a fleet of helicopters.  Brought into contact with, and having the opportunity to carry out the programming of, several newly installed computers, whilst working in a second line support role gave the impetus to change to a computing based career.

Education and Personal Details

1984 HND Mathematics and BTEC Class I Avionics
1976 4 ‘O’ Levels Mathematics, English, Physics and German Language

Hobbies and interests: carpentry, reading, music, photography and all things to do with the computers and the internet

Languages: German – but pretty rusty as not used since 1984