Mark Suter's Résumé
Mobile: 0411 262 316
Email: <suter@zwitterion.org>
I am a geek with a deep interest in the how and why of complex systems. I have a strong focus on getting things to work well and contributing to the learning of my fellow professionals.
Qualifications
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) (2009)
LPIC-1 and LPIC-2, Linux Professional Institute (2004).
Bachelor of Science (Honours, IIA) (Computer Science) The University of Queensland (February 1994 - November 1997).
Memberships
- Member, Internet Society of Australia.
- Member, League of Professional System Administrators.
- Member, Systems Administrators Guild of Australia.
- Member, Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia.
- Member and Practicing Computer Professional, Australian Computer Society.
- Past President and Founding member, Home Unix Machine Brisbane Users Group.
- Life member, Electronic Frontiers Australia.
- "Member" of the Internet Engineering Task Force Working Group on the Domain Name System.
Major Skills
- Extensive Linux (many distributions) and Solaris Systems Administration experience in complex, 24/7 environments.
- A broad-based understanding of "How the Internet works" and the ability to incorporate new things into my existing experience. I know how to read RFCs and how to apply them to real-world situations.
- Getting the work done using the best tools for the job, mostly Perl, PHP, Shell and C but also including awk, sed, expect, python and C/C++. A professional interest in maintainable code.
- Large scale DNS with BIND and Microsoft Active Directory, including troubleshooting registrations/delegations, APNIC block allocations and reverses and the myriad of problems caused by faulty DNS setups.
- Wide-ranging email experience, both controlling it in the gateway/firewall environment and managing it at the endpoints where the messages are delivered. I know what SMTP, POP and IMAP are and can explain in detail how they inter-relate.
- My conference presentations have been well received, most recently at the 2012 Linux.conf.au in Ballarat.
- Major Apache experience with many virtual hosts in a commercial hosting environment, including work with application developers to modify applications to work behind reverse proxies.
- Web development experience, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX and server-side code in several languages, all with an eye to the W3 standards and making functional websites that work in all web browsers.
- Experience with Squid as a web proxy for dial-up and LAN customers, including multiple levels of caches and complex access control lists (acls).
- Experience with a wide range of environments, including Switches, Routers, Load balancers, many Unix variants (Linux, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Digital Unix / Tru64, Free/Open/Net BSD) and some Microsoft Windows.
Employment
1 July 2008 - Present
Unisys Australia
91 Northbourne Avenue
Turner ACT 2612
+61 2 6274 3555
Full-time Permanent
Position: Senior Gateway Engineer, reporting to Gateway Manager.
Key work includes:
- Technical Lead for a large and complex secure gateway for a single large government client. The gateway has many different types of devices forming a response to the risks faced in connecting to the world.
- Maintaining our knowledge management system, including several bespoke additions. This is a DokuWiki I created in my first week and the topic of several of my conference presentations.
- Extensive debugging and troubleshooting of environments that only ever seem to grow more complex as time progresses. Increasingly, this is an exercise in incremental improvements to our documentation.
- Mentoring several colleagues, especially in Perl and Shell but also in more "soft" skills like incident response and problem solving.
5 February 2001 - 27 June 2008
Miju Systems
PO Box 176
Corinda Q 4075
+61 7 3236 0262
Full-time Permanent
Position: Consultant, reporting to Company Director.
Key work includes:
- Reimplementation and ongoing maintenance (especially trouble-shooting) of the gateway environment for a large manufacturing and services organisation. The environment hosted the company's' websites and email, remote access to key corporate systems, business-to-business systems and provided access for many desktop users at numerous sites.
- Technical security audit of systems and related work on "secure build" documents for both government and financial organisations.
- Development of quality, maintainable "glue" scripts to connect various systems together in ways not properly support by the systems themselves, for example, importing data into a large management system.
- Administration of Solaris hosts in a gateway environment; designing, implementing and maintaining a set of daemons to enforce security policies on those hosts; and creating a system of scripts to trace graph email from though the entire security gateway complex.
- Introducing major improvements to a reporting system on Internet access for a 60,000+ user population. This included tools to generate reports (daily and on-demand) and a web interface allowing arbitrary searches across many gigabytes of Internet access log files.
- Mentoring several colleagues in secure programming techniques, mainly in Perl and Shell on Solaris and Debian GNU/Linux systems.
- Integration of commercial anti-virus software into both email and web filtering for a large client using free and open source software before it was the norm.
20 April 1998 - 2 February 2001
Information Technology Services
The University of Queensland Q 4072
+61 7 3365 3690
Full-time Permanent
Position: Systems Administrator, reporting to Supervising Systems Administrator.
Key responsibilities included:
- Operation and Development of the UQ DNS service. The University's nameservers host over 1250 zones, supporting well over 50,000 clients.
- Management of UQ's IP address space. The University utilizes over 200 000 IP address within its various networks. Within my role as Hostmaster, I was responsible for the management of this address space.
- Development and operation of systems to monitor production networks and computing systems. Includes associated paging and notification systems for handling unscheduled outages.
- Unix Systems Administration of the Digital Unix systems that provided the central networking services, including DNS, mail, news, authentication, web, proxy, login and modem bank management servers.
Other History
I have undertaken a number of consultancies to implement Internet-exposed DNS and email servers for Financial and Manufacturing organizations since January 2000.
April 1999 - September 2008
As a member of the Humbug Executive, I shared responsibility for the mailing lists, websites and associated servers.
August 2003 - February 2007
I maintained the small office network for the East Brisbane Community Center that I installed using a Debian GNU/Linux server and for their half-dozen desktops. They enjoyed a very reliable email service.
June 1999 - May 2000
I did some ad hoc volunteer Systems Administration for the Brisbane office of Community Aid Abroad - Oxfam Australia. They have an E-Smith server and approximately a dozen desktops, all with Internet access and local email accounts.
February 1994 - November 1997
Whilst at University full-time, I performed many small ad hoc computer support roles. These included Desktop Support and Systems Administration for Computer Science and Electrical Engineering faculty members.
Referees
Referees are available upon request. Feel free to ask about the results when you Google me!
Interests
- Free Software/Open Source software, including GNU/Linux, particularly Debian.
- Science Fiction and Fantasy, particularly Babylon 5 and those similar shows that have followed in its wake.
- Security and Privacy, both in the abstract and in their detailed implementations.