Stuart Luscombe Email & Phone Number

Andover, England, United Kingdom

Southampton, England, United Kingdom

Southampton, United Kingdom

London, United Kingdom

As the sole point of contact for IT support within the department I am responsible for maintaining the local infrastructure which consists of 25 servers running Windows Server or Red Hat Linux across 2 locations and 80-90 users split between desktops and laptops running Windows, Linux and Mac OS. I am also called in to assist other departments across the Institute due to my knowledge of running Linux (RHEL 6/7, Ubuntu).Upon starting I found that I had inherited many ad-hoc solutions for e-mail, authentication, file storage, backup and HPC. Many of these systems were undocumented and a single service crash would bring down the whole department.Since then I have implemented a number of changes such as moving all authentication to an Active Directory domain, virtualised the IT infrastructure using Hyper-V, consolidated storage, improved backup reliability with Veeam, automated OS deployment, configuration and patch management using Red Hat Satellite and Microsoft MDT/WDS/WSUS.

Main duties included the daily checking of all backups, log files and re-running any scheduled tasks that have failed overnight. I managed the entire company IT infrastructure which comprised of 60 users split between desktops and laptops, 15 servers, linux-based firewall and various ad-hoc solutions.In this role I gained much experience in Windows Server 2003 as well as gaining exposure to SQL Server 2000 and 2005. In addition, I've gained a lot of experience in the setting up, maintaining and configuring of Linux (particularly the Fedora distribution).In mid-2007 I was asked to undertake a project to replace the company e-mail system with a more robust and up-to-date system which would provide calendaring and out of office functions. While the obvious choice for this kind of work would be Microsoft Exchange, the company did not wish to fund the system or commit to a licensing agreement. With this I tested out various different open-source systems before eventually settling on a system named Zimbra. In late 2007 I setup the system for testing, integrating it seamlessly with the existing e-mail infrastructure.

Main duties included the daily checking of backups, logfiles, ensuring that company owned stores and concessions had sent their sales back to Head Office without any problems and resolving any problems should they have occurred.I managed the entire IT infrastructure of the company consisting of 40-50 users spread across 2 sites, this included all PC and server equipment as well as telephony. The server base comprised of 2 servers running the Windows 2000 Server OS along with Exchange 2000 as an e-mail platform, an additional HP-UX based server running an Oracle 8i database was also partly maintained by myself. Additionally I had some exposure to configuring Cisco and Checkpoint devices to a basic level as well as monitoring network traffic for possible problems or abuse.During my time in this role I learned about the fashion retail solution software known as CIMS. I have been fully trained in the administration and maintenance of this system to the level that is required by the company that develop it as well as writing custom SQL queries to satisfy any reporting needs that are required, but not covered by the CIMS built-in reporting solutions.In this role I was responsible for any IT and telecommunications purchasing that were required. This led to me be involved in submitting proposals to the Board of Directors and then following up with tender documents to suppliers for each phase of a project. One of the projects I was heavily involved in was to update the company desktop environment from Windows 98/Office 97 to Windows XP/Office 2003. In doing this I deployed the CA Unicenter management suite across our entire IT base enabling me to remotely install and configure all machines from standard images which I had built in a test environment.

Initially employed on the technical support desk, I was responsible for taking incoming calls from customers who required technical assistance.This involved talking customers through the setup and installation of various pieces of hardware and software. While in this position I was also responsible for dealing with technical support problems that had come in from our larger corporate customers. These normally involved dealing with server configurations that the company did not normally support (NT, Win2k, *nix variants).From this role I moved over to the companies upgrades centre. Here I furthered my software and hardware maintenance skills by upgrading customers PC's, repairing out of warranty machines and also building complete systems from scratch to a customer’s own specification. In this role I had to deal with customers face-to-face and assist them in resolving the problems they are having.During my time in the role I also helped out other departments when they have been short staffed or the company has been particularly busy. With this I have gained experience in general warehouse work, shipping products via DHL, laptop repair and fielding customer services calls.

Information Technology

I enrolled onto a GNVQ course to study IT. However after the first year I did not feel the course was meeting the expectations I had.

Gcse, Gcse

Gained 10 GCSE's in grade C or above. These include IT (B), Maths (C), English (C), Science (B,B) and Business Studies (C). I also.