Working in the Mathematical Institute supporting post-graduates, researchers, faculty staff and research. I work heavily with a wide range of application, services and platforms, the most frequent often being Linux and UNIX based systems.

Sole responsibility as the Linux System Administrator for the Department of Engineering, Design and Mathematics as well as the Department of Computer Science and Creative Technology. I continually assisted my colleges in UNIX, Macintosh and Windows, providing specialist Linux expertise and general cross-platform IT service delivery. For instance I took responsibility for maintaining the Faculty wide storage system working in a heterogeneous environment as well as their remote access services. Was extensively involved with development of the service, having pioneered many new projects including a SAN based HA storage solution based on GlusterFS. I also implemented the first HA virtualisation environment using Xen. My users ranged from students, support staff and allot of direct support of academics.

Working via an agency called Max20 working primarily with the Microsoft Windows based platform, networking and telecommunications.

What can I say, I needed the money back then. I did enjoy the ITIL foundation based training and went on to provide IT Help Desk support for Britannia Airlines and Transport for London (TfL). I provided support on Windows NT through to Windows XP and Macintosh environments as well applications deployed via Citrix.

Started out programming a new bar-code stock control system and e-commerce interface for a warehouse using Linux server technology and MySQL with PHP for the back-end. Also involved development of Win32 based client programmed in Visual C++. After working on this project, I waspromoted to system administrator, maintaining and deploying several servers including Linux and Microsoft Servers. Day to day activities included providing IT Services & maintaining all servers as well as scheduled back-up routines. I deployed SuSE Linux Open Exchange, Outlook client/ Linux server environment and several other new services.