This is a brief description of my Unix Systems background
I was introduced to Unix in 1986 while working on a Masters Degree at the University of Colorado Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. At that time I had a moderate level of computer experiance from working on my own Zenith XT clone and through a years professional work in Building Energy Simulation on a NOAA Cyber, involving extensive work in Lotus 123 building a national data base of building energy related climate data.
My thesis involved the integration of several EPA computer resource in an integrated environmental modeling system and required porting fortran code and proprietary database systems from the DOS and VMS environments. This requred developing expertise with VMS installations at both the University of Colorado and the EPA's Athens Research Laboratory. In the course of the work I acquired skill with the numerous magnetic tape formats requried to faciliate code and data transferral beteen OS environments (this work preceeded network integration software now available between the Unix and VMS systems).Following completion of my degree I was employed with the University as a Professional Research Assistance and took on the task of administering a hetrerogeneous subnet of Unix, VMX, Dos and Macintosh workstations for CU's Center for Advanced Decision Support in Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES). During this period (1988-1991) the CADSWES subnet grew from 5 SUN3 workstations to 35 workstations including SUNs, DECs (both Ultrix and VMS), HP, IBM, DG, SGI, ATT (3b2's) serving 4 GB of SMD and SCSI disc, supporting numerous printers, plotters, digitizers, tape drives and modems). My duties included specification of all CADSWES computer resource acquisition, advising on acquisitions for numerous sponsoring agencies, configuring and delivering project related hardware and advising software developers on system, software and hardware issues.
During my tenure at CADSWES we purchased and configured a 7 node SUN UNIX network on behalf of the Earth Sciences Division of the US Bureau of Reclamation. This network was installed at the Denver Federal Center in October of 1990. In the past 4 years I have continued to provide UNIX consulting services to this research group including training system adminsitrators, developing system management procedures, advising on computer resource acquisitions, and assisiting in problem resolution. This subnet now consist of 27 (SUN, DEC and DG) workstations and dozen X server configured PC's accessing 14 GB of distributeed SMD and SCSI disks; 4 printers, 4 digitizers, a calcomp plotter, a shinko thermal transfer color printer, 6 tape drives (1/2", 1/4", 4mm ,and 8mm formats), modem service, 2 SLIP subnets. This network supports around 100 water resource engineers employed in software development and resource management analysis using a variety of software packages (Arc/Info, Grass, Surf3, AutoCad, Ingress, Oracle, Framemaker, Word Perfect, Lotus, etc)
In 1990 I acquired a used Sun 3/60 at auction and have maintained this system as a remote node to the USBR subnet through a 9600 baud SLIP line. Though this node I have full internet access and have used it to keep current with the wide variety of new protocols and services blossoming on the internet. In the last year I have devoted much free time to learning the intricacies of the WWW and the Mosaic Document Browsing system. Some of this expertise I have recently applied to voluteeer work with the Boulder Community Network; a experimental community information service being developed for the Boulder, CO. community.
During the last 2 years I have continued to provide Unix Systems and Software development services to the USBR as a professional services contractor telecommunting the 30 miles from South Boulder to the Denver Federal Center. In addition to providing Unix consulting for the Denver Office I have assissted several USBR regional offices in the acquisition, installation and configuration of Unix systems (SUN and DG) adviced the USBR Information Resource Division on network and security issues, assisted in the installation of subnets for research clients throughout the world (Korea, Cyprus, Brazil, Montana, California, Utah, Idaho) and assisted in Unix training of USBR professional engineering staff.
Throughout my engineering career and particularly through my Unix services I have become used to being a resource of last resort. I am accustomed to taking on problems others have given up on and following through with solutions, whatever is required. I am accustomed to dealing with system incompatibilities, hacking system and public domain source code, dealing with manufacturers representitives and technical personal, posting questions to usenet, and establishing informal contacts. I am always willing to learn and can come up to speed quickly in totally new areas of expertise. I am experianced in most Unix utilities, the C, Fortran, Pascal and Basic programming languages, C shell script programming, SQL and the Ingres Database management system, X11, Motif, and GKS graphics libraries and a wide variety of system services and application software.