Christopher M. Smith
cms at kronos dot net
Status: Currently Employed
Alternate Resume Formats: PDF Word
Career Summary
Systems Administrator and Information Technology manager with nine years experience in cross-platform systems management. Experience with administering complex, heterogeneous, enterprise environments coupled with excellent communication and writing skills. Solid experience with managing small to mid-size teams engaged in multiple projects to ensure service delivery and project completion.
Software
Operating Systems
FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Solaris / SunOS, Microsoft Windows NT4/2000/XP
Languages
HTML, SQL, Shell (bash, ksh, tcsh), XML, Perl, Ruby
Services
Automount, DHCP, DNS, FTP, LDAP, NIS, NTP, Source Code Management (RCS, CVS, Subversion), SSH, SSL
Applications
File Servers (AFS/OpenAFS, NFS, Samba), Web (Apache, Netscape Internet Server, IIS), Solaris Jumpstart, Red Hat Linux Kickstart, Mail (Exim, Exchange, Sendmail, Netscape Messenger, Courier IMAP/POP), Database (MSSQL, MySQL), Netsaint, Veritas (Volume Manager, Cluster Server, File System, NetBackup)

Experience
Network Appliance, Inc. (January 2006-Present)
World-class storage vendor for enterprise class data management systems.

Product and Partner Engineer (January 2006 - Present)
  • Act as customer escalation point for difficult technical issues centered around using NFS for customers using Linux in enterprise environments
  • Author technical white papers and best practice guidelines in the areas of storage deployment, configuration, and performance tuning
  • Participate in Linux product certification and beta testing for Linux partners and vendors
  • Assist in providing technical guidance to customers in pre-sales and post-sales activities
Red Hat, Inc. (January 2004-December 2005)
Red Hat, Inc. is the world's most trusted provider of Linux and open source technology.

Operations Manager (January 2005 - December 2005)
  • Line management of five person team responsible for managing all external, customer facing systems.
  • Defining SLA metrics to set success criteria for the team.
  • Coordinated, planned, prioritized, and staffed large scale projects including:
    • Operating system upgrades of production systems across multiple global data centers with minimal downtime.
    • Auditing and enhancing existing SAN / NAS infrastructure across the production environment for higher capacity and peformance.
    • Rollout of additional systems for capacity planning and growth of customer facing applications.
    • Establishment of a centralized document management portal to provide knowledge sharing across the global IS team to ensure consistent operating procedures.
Senior Systems Administrator / Technnical Lead (January 2004 - January 2005)
  • Responsible for managing and providing capacity planning for all production, client facing systems, located globally. Sites include:
    • ftp.redhat.com and its associated infrastructure
    • www.redhat.com and its associated infrastructure
    • rhn.redhat.com and its associated infrastructure
  • Providing oncall support after hours to maintain stability and uptime.
  • Writing documentation and training materials to bring new members of the team up to speed.
  • Technical Project work includes:
    • Development and implementation of SAN storage using Netapp clusters for production systems.
    • Working as a liason with other internal groups to streamline release process and efficiency improvements across development groups. This included documentation as well as Perl code and automation scripts for providing efficiency increases across the Red Hat development environment.
Collective Technologies (June 1999-December 2003)
Collective Technologies is a consulting and managed services company that provides consulting services and support to channel partners and direct clients. Services include incremental staffing, Managed Infrastructure (outsourcing / co-sourcing), and partner-based service delivery.

Operations Manager (January 2003 - December 2003)
  • Line management of twelve-person team responsible for staffing a 24x7 Remote Management Center (RMC).
    • Responsible for coordinating the interview / training process for potential new hires.
    • Managed RMC team to ensure SLA agreements with clients met or exceeded expectations.
    • Coordinated training programs and documentation efforts for educating and supporting existing team members.
    • Wrote Statements of Work to define staffing, requirements, and objectives for new client positions.
    • Provided project management to plan, staff, and schedule weekend related client work involving downtime, system upgrades, new hardware, and other processes that would otherwise impact production systems.
  • Developed and documented Change Order Requests to transition work from the client to the RMC.
  • Provided pre-sales support related to new business development.
  • Acted as technical and management escalation point for handling client-facing issues.
  • 24x7 on call for handling procedural and technical issues.
Systems Engineer, Technical Lead (September 2001 - January 2003)
  • Led technical team of twelve in handling UNIX / NT based systems management for financial (Morgan Stanley), educational (University of Massachusetts Lowell), and the IT consulting (internal Collective Technologies IT department) markets.
  • For Morgan Stanley, systems management duties consisted of staffing the North American Unix Operations Group and North American PC Server Operations Group. Machines and services administered include:
    • Sun workstations and enterprise class Sun hardware running Solaris 2.5 to Solaris 8.
    • Dell / Compaq hardware running Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition.
    • Dell / Compaq hardware running Windows NT 4.0 / 2000.
    • Technologies administered include Veritas (Cluster Server, NetBackup, and Volume Manager), AFS / OpenAFS server, NFS, NIS, Sendmail / Postfix, LDAP, Active Directory, IIS, and MS-SQL.
    • Services provided to the client included:
      • Answering incoming hotlines to handle outages and issues across the environment.
      • Providing UNIX / NT support to business units.
      • Building out new systems to the specifications of the client.
      • Installation and configuration of clustering or other technologies as necessary.
      • Troubleshooting of problems or issues related to existing services in the client environment.
      • Specific to NT, providing rollouts of Microsoft hotfixes to 1,000+ machines on a bi-monthly basis.
  • Responsible for documenting configuration and administration of new and existing servers / services into "run books" for other members of the staff to follow while working on client systems.
Consultant (September 1999 - September 2001)
  • Network Appliance: Provided onsite system support with existing projects. Automated the installation of all hosts being built in the Waltham, MA regional office, including writing a custom PHP based Red Hat Linux Kickstart website, A Solaris Jumpstart server, and Ghost images for PC based systems.
  • Scudder Investments: Provided 24x7 support for their production web infrastructure, consisting of Netscape Enterprise Server, the Dynamo Java Application Server, and Documentum. Implemented a ticketing system (WREQ) for handling production and development environment issues to track ongoing issues. Wrote Perl / CGI scripts to automate repeated tasks.
  • Houston Street Exchange: Developed and implemented a migration plan for moving an existing Novell Groupwise 5.x mail server to Windows NT 4.0 / Exchange 5.5. Wrote Perl scripts to convert Groupwise address books to standard .csv files, allowing them to be imported into the Exchange directory.
  • Brigham and Women's Hospital: Developed a pilot UNIX / PC desktop solution using Solaris workstation hardware with SunPCI cards to allow the use of UNIX hardware with Microsoft Office applications. Automated a majority of the build process, and made environment suggestions as to how this could be fully automated in the future.
  • RSA Security: Performed a regional security audit of RSA UNIX and NT infrastructure of their Web / Mail, and MS-SQL database systems. Presented the audit findings in company presentation of Officer level and above.
  • Fidelity Investments: Assisted with certifying the internal codebase at Fidelity Investments as Year 2000 compliant. Wrote shell scripts to roll dates backwards and forwards on test machines within an isolated, controlled network. Daily administration of UNIX servers maintaining NIS, DNS, NFS, and Oracle/Sybase.
Shore.Net (Now Primus Business Services) (August 1997 - June 1999)
Shore.Net was a regional Internet Service Provider (ISP) that was bought by Primus Business Services within the last five years. Shore.Net sold ISP services such as leased lines, web hosting, dial-up accounts, and dedicated server leasing / hosting prior to its acquisition.

Hosting Support Specialist / NT Systems Engineer
  • Lead Engineer on developing a Microsoft MS-SQL backend for NT based web-hosting products.
  • Automated the installation, configuration, and deployment of Windows NT servers using Perl with specific attention to database and OS security.
  • Wrote Transact-SQL stored procedures to automate administrative processes and create, update, and delete databases for use by a UNIX Sybase based billing system for automatic database creation.
  • Acted as a Sales Engineer for selling web-hosting clients on dedicated NT server builds to meet custom needs.
  • Wrote proactive NT monitoring scripts to watch for performance degradation, system issues, and for gathering a baseline for establishing hardware upgrade paths.
Pioneer Mutual Funds, Pioneer Funds Distribution Group (November 1996 - August 1997)
Commissions Coordinator
  • Responsible for managing the payment of and tracking of broker-dealers of Pioneer Mutual Funds.
  • Responsible for working the incoming wire-trade desk for manual incoming trades.
Education
B.A in English and Religion, Graduate Cum Laude. Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA
Interests
Member: USENIX, Sage
Open Source: OpenDarwin Committor for the DarwinPorts Mac OS X Packaging System
Activities: Juggling, Creative Writing, Deep Sea Fishing