Luke

Projects:

• The Book of Xen: Pulling from our experiences at prgmr.com, Chris and I wrote The Book of Xen to be published shortly by No-starch Press.
• Xen virtual hosting platform: I designed, implemented and still maintain a system for hosting xen-based virtual servers. See http://prgmr.com/xen/
• FreeBSD jails: I created a similar system using FreeBSD jails as the underlying technology.
• Marketing: I have marketed prgmr.com so successfully that I usually run out of capacity within a week of installing a new server.
• San on a budget: I implemented a 1gigabit Fibre-channel san, using Brocade SilkWorm 2400 switches, a Dell 224F, and a Sun storedge 5200. I used zones on the SilkWorm to mediate access to the disks. Prgmr.com later returned to using local disk, but it was an interesting learning experience.
• Will work for venture capital: I bootstraped the company, in a traditionally capital intensive market by renting myself out as a contractor.

Projects:

• Ldap single-sign on: I implemented a LDAP authentication system using pam and nss_ldap. I managed an orderly conversion from the legacy NIS system to OpenLDAP
• Hardware benchmarking: I benchmarked various rackmount and blade servers, and various storage hardware in an attempt to find the most cost effective configuration.
• Large scale Nagios rollout: I participated in the design and implentation of a large scale nagios monitoring system.

Projects:

• memtest86 modifications: I recompiled memtest86 to output over serial, then I modified the pass/fail messages to make it easier to automatically 'screen scrape' the results from the serial console.
• semi-automated hardware failure detection: Through automated and manual processes I identified thousands of bad disks, and many other bad components in servers in the Yahoo search cluster.

Projects:

• qemu modification: I wrote a small patch to qemu in order to force a 'reboot' of the virtual machiene to cause qemu to exit
• dev environment virtualization: I modified a RHEL 4 environment with a new kernel and other changes to be a Xen Dom0.

Projects:

• Financial website: Wayne and I colaberated to help a stockbroker build a website to display real-time stock quotes. I acted as the DBA, the System Administrator and the Project Manager, while Wayne managed the application programming. We moved the database backend from Microsoft SQL to MySQL, and the server from IIS to Apache on FreeBSD, taking the site from 'unusably slow' to 'rather fast'
• book price search automation software: I built software that scraped prices from amazon.com, half.com, powels.com, and several other booksellers. the user would enter an ISBN of a book they wanted, and my system would return the price from various vendors.

Projects:

• Kerberos and LDAP single sign on: I implemented a single sign on system for OSX using mit Kerberos and OpenLDAP.
• Dspam mailhub: I implemented a mailhub setup with Postfix, MySQL, Dspam and ClamAV to provide our customers with spam filtering abilities. This project was never moved out of the testing phase, due to problems with quarantines with more than 7000 messages in the test case.
• mbox conversion to Courier maildir: I wrote a patch for courier to allow us to migrate our current unix mbox mailboxes to maildir without altering the UIDL values for our customers that 'leave mail on server' See http://prgmr.com/~lsc/courier/
• data center setup and management: I was instramental in setting up and managing several co-located data centers.
• server assembly: I built servers from parts.

Projects:

• DCC: I was involved with the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse project. My contributions included a m4 macro that allowed sendmail to reject at SMTP time based on the 'bulkness' returned by the DCC server.
• easy CVS interface: I created a system that gave the lawyers an easy-to-use web interface to see our website at various points in history. I pulled the historical data out of RCS files.

Projects:

• Dynamically Configured Mass Virtual Hosting: I patched mod_vhost_alias to make both www.sub.domain.com and sub.domain.com go to the same place with an arbitrary number of subdomains. This made our hosted websites quite a bit faster, without disturbing our domain.co.uk customers, and others with an odd number of subdomains.
• pop3 proxy modifications: I patched the in-house POP3 proxy jps.net used to map users to the proper mail servers so that it used a MySQL backend. Before, it simply opened a file on the NAS that corresponded to the user's user name. Response times during peak hours went from 3-10 seconds to under one second. Filesystems are not databases.
• MS Access ODBC conversion: Without altering the existing codebase, I was able to convert our internal customer tracking database from the default Access FileServer backend to a MySQL backend using ODBC. (in spite of good performance, it was never implemented in production.)