John Ross

623 Greenwood Ave, Toronto, Ontario M4J 4B1

Cell: 647-290-5018 E-Mail: jhr@pretzel-logic.ca

 

Objective

UNIX Systems Administrator / LINUX Systems Administrator / Infrastructure Engineer / Automation Specialist / Architect

 

Profile

Senior IT Professional with:

-  Over 15 years of experience in IT

-  Extensive experience with a variety of UNIX and LINUX operating systems

-  Excellent knowledge of Internet technologies

-  Broad knowledge of networking tools and protocols

-  Experienced with both physical and electronic security methodologies

 

Employment History:

MessageLabs/Symantec                                                                                                                                
Provider of Òsoftware as a serviceÓ (SaaS) security products. Offers in-line web, IM and email filtering over a global network.         

Senior Service Platform Engineer                                                                          August 2009 – Present
Responsible for planning, building upgrades and new features into the Web and IM products, while ensuring that the infrastructure can be supported by the NOC

á      Build and maintain MessageLabsÕ global SaaS web filtering infrastructure to maintain 100% service availability

á      Co-ordinate with hardware and software deployment teams to ensure smooth upgrades

á      Represent the infrastructure team on projects to ensure new features can be effectively supported and maintained

á      Led the effort to automate setup of new clusters, reducing implementation times for new environments by 80%

á      Assist the NPS team in implementing upgrades to allow QA to properly test new services

Technologies Used: HP DL360 / RedHat Linux / F5 LTM / F5 GTM / VMWare / PXE / Squid /

            Shell Scripting / NetApp / Cisco Switches

 

Non-Production Support Engineer                                                            September 2007 – August 2009
Designed and built new development and QA environments in Toronto

á      Implemented and maintained a network in Toronto to support the QA and development teams

á      Assisted in the design of a new network to support virtualization and allow faster provisioning and better support with lower costs

á      Support the development and QA departments in Toronto

á      Liaise with Service Platform Engineers to design and implement new functional testing environments

Technologies Used: HP DL360 / RedHat Linux / Cisco CSS / VMWare / Shell Scripting / Cacti / NetApp

Cisco Switches

 

 

Pretzel Logic

E-Mail and groupware hosting provider

Owner/Operator                                                                                     September 2005 – September 2007

Started this business to focus on minimizing silently dropped emails while maintaining accurate SPAM and virus detection

á      Designed and built a scalable e-mail and groupware hosting platform to  provide clients with maximum uptime and performance

á      Set up and maintained a set of firewalls based on OpenBSD's PF to protect against unwanted and/or malicious traffic

á      Implemented advanced SPAM and anti-virus solutions to help ensure end-users' security

á      Constantly monitored the network and servers for security breaches using pro-active countermeasures and intrusion detection systems

á      Monitor for performance problems to ensure that customers continue to receive excellent service

Technologies Used: FreeBSD / PF / Anti-virus / Anti-SPAM / Postfix / Cyrus IMAP / OpenGroupware /      Horde Groupware / Apache /  PostgreSQL

 

TD Canada Trust

A large international bank based in Canada

Contractor                                                                                                                    April 2002-June 2006

Built a large distributed batch processing system

á      Led the batch development of two major projects that continues to save the bank several million dollars per quarter

á      Helped architect and implement a massively distributed computing grid

á      Helped design and implement procedures to ensure the bank remained SOX/COSO compliant

á      Mentored new team members, enabling them to become valuable resources

á      Designed and developed multiple monitoring applications to enable troubleshooting and accelerate resolution times

Technologies Used: BASH Shell Scripting / PERL / Sun Grid Engine / Solaris / Suse Linux / Apache

 

Netcom/AT&T Canada IES

A national ISP that offered access as well as hosting. Over 5 years I held three different positions, the last of which was a UNIX Systems Administrator

UNIX Systems Administrator                                                                                 June 1998 – April 2002

A member of a large team that was responsible for all production UNIX servers

á      Developed and secured the server template for the FreeBSD servers to allow fast provisioning of new hardware

á      Helped ensure servers and networks were secure and kept current

á      Lead the sysadmin group's Y2K effort to ensure service levels would be maintained through the year 2000 turnover

á      Trained the customer maintenance group on DNS procedures to facilitate the handoff from the Sysadmin group

Technologies Used: Solaris / FreeBSD / Apache / SendMail / Postfix / Sparc Servers / NetApp

 

Education