Way way back, my first job was working
for my parents on their apple orchard. My starting pay was 10 cents
an hour. The family joke is it was 5 cents more than I was worth!
My first "computer job" was
working for the
Computer Science
Department at
Ohio University.
I think my title was Network Administrator, but I ran wiring,
soldered, puchdown blocks, and watched computer labs. Along the way I
had a great time working as an intern at the
NASA
Glenn Research Center.
After I graduated from Indiana, I
worked for
Nortel (BNR) in
Dallas Texas. I played with all sorts of odd Unix systems that are no
longer in existence (I hope!). That is where I started to build
systems, grab a screwdriver, plug-in cards, load and configure the
OS. While growing up on a farm, I was used to working with my hands
on equipment, so I've always jumped at the opportunity to physically
work on systems, or lean over a vendor to see what he/she is doing. I
supported several programming groups at Nortel, so I was blessed with
being in charge of the revision control system. We used RCS, and CVS
to control the source code, and I revamped a "loadbuild"
system to check out code, compile and package up the programs. My
first cut at the loadbuild system was based on solely on makefiles. I
played around with perl at IU for various tasks, so I then ported the
loadbuild system to perl. It was my first major perl effort, which
was a lot of fun. My interests in finite automata and regular
expressions were a nice match for perl. sed had the regular
expression capability, but the sh shell can be a pain to program with
a lack of data structures. Perl is a nice blend of regular
expressions and the ground work for a state machine. I've been using
perl ever since, my C has suffered though :(
Shortly after our daughter was born,
we moved to Northwest Ohio to be closer to our families. (Since then
my wife's family moved to Florida, well it does make for cheap
vacations!). I worked at
BGSU for
a while, but things moved a little slow for me, so I accepted a
position at
Dana.
At Dana I did a lot of nifty stuff,
web admin, system security, ERP (Yikes!), terabytes of data etc... I
managed Dana's website, and ran all of Dana's Internet systems
(sendmail, DNS, web, news, ftp etc...). Along the way I got involved
with the ANX (Automative Network eXchage), and
AIAG.
ANX intention was a B-to-B network, based on IPSec. That is when I
started playing around with firewalls. Firewalls were used to tunnel
data over secure IPSec packets. I traveled to several "bakeoffs"
where the various firewall vendors worked on getting their systems to
communicate with other firewall vendors. Neat stuff.
An ERP project was placed on my plate,
it was a full time job plus some! Basically I worked with a group of
consultants to spec out and build the infrastructure for two
BaaN
ERP systems running on HPUX systems and Oracle. That was a lot of
fun, but a lot of hours.... I built the development systems, and
supported them while we built the production systems. We used K and V
class systems with MC/ServiceGuard for failover along with
EMC
disk frames.
I did a lot of cool stuff at
Rockwell Automation.
We were mostly a Sun shop, but I had the pleasure to manage a fair
number of Tru64 clusters. My official title was Unix Systems
Architect.
I was loured away to Penton Media by some former Rockwell Automation
management. Penton was mostly a Sun shop, but I had some HP
systems to deal with as
well. My official title was Security Architect, firewalls, email
gateways/routers, DNS and other UNIX systems were my focus.
Robin and I decided to do something different, work and live abroad.
We moved to Dhahran Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2003 to work
for Saudi Aramco, my current employer. My sole focus is UNIX
security here at Aramco.
