User:Keithchristian

The beginning of my Wikipedia User Page.

Keith V. Christian https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithchristian/

Education: B.A. Mathematics, Concordia University - Irvine, Ca. EET (Electronics Technology), DeVry Tech - Atlanta, Ga.

Certificates: OWASP 10 Requirements (2023.)

Top Skills: Linux 20+ years, familiar with Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux. I can help with OS upgrade projects, saving time and money. Ansible. Manage devices, collect data for improved performance and reliability, saving time and money. Bash shell: 20+ years. Hundreds of bash scripts written for automation, disk clean up, system monitoring, etc. Korn shell: 5 years. Many ksh scripts written for legacy systems not equipped with other shells. MySQL, 1 year. Write SQL queries, export data from MySQL, clean data for importation into PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL, 1 year. Systems requiring PostgreSQL could now communicate with other devices via PostgreSQL. Automated data imports from MySQL, write SQL queries, create reports for further automation. Expect, TCL, Shell, Perl, GNU toolset, standard Unix utilities. Well versed with all commonly used Unix tools, can solve many infrastructure and common problems with combinations or single tools

Web: Proficient with HTML, CSS. Familar with the Apache web server. Created a website for a non-profit from scratch with Linux, Apache and PHP, chose hosting provider and successfully deployed it.

Security and Recent Project History: Detect and block DDOS attacks at the host system, saving time and money. Throttle data transfers to avoid network and CPU saturation, and similar use cases. Mitigated DDOS and scans with fail2ban, along with a custom blocking package written in an afternoon, based on tcpdump and iptables, and the GNU toolset. Fail2ban: Helps prevent systems from being compromised from outside actors. Stops inbound high frequency scans within a few seconds of appearance. I know how to finesse Fail2bans configuration files for best reliability, saving time and money. Analyze/filter/block IP traffic utilizing shell, tcpdump and iptables.

Fluent or Proficient, previous years: Ping, traceroute, nmap, wireshark, tcpdump, essential tools for managing and monitoring networks. SMTP / POP3: High Availability Sendmail / Surgemail clusters, I can help companies that manage their own email infrastructure, saving time and money. DNS: BIND, Configuration and Zone setup, geographically redundant DNS servers. Mediawiki, Very powerful Wiki software which powers Wikipedia and large corporate internal wikis. Nagios. Can monitor nearly any networked device, saving time and money with constant monitoring for a nearly unlimited number of devices.

Hardware, Current: For these manufacturers, I performed remote management in the data center when remote hands were not available, saving time and money. Dell Poweredge nodes, iDrac RACADM scripting. Supermicro blades, IPMI, SMASH scripting. HP DL3XX hpiLO, IPMI, SMASH scripting.

Westat, Incorporated (Contract position, short term) Feb 2024 Current, MAILMAN Technical SME Administrator Manage upgrade from Mailman v2.1 to Mailman 3. Prepare servers, research optimal upgrade path.

Charter Communications (Contract position, short term) Nov 2023 Jan 2024, DNS Engineer System Engineer III DNS Engineering Lab Maintain VMWare virtual instances for DNS testing with firmware and OS updates, administrate Nagios monitoring system. Installed the logrotate utility on all servers.

Lumen Technologies Edge Compute Lab Team (Contract position) Jan 2023 Oct 2023, Site Reliability Engineer and DevOps Became familiar with SRE operations including Metal-as-a-Service installation and readiness techniques. Fiber optic, and CAT-5 / 6, blade maintenance on Supermicro and Dell servers installation, and: Installing and troubleshooting fiber optics, SFP modules. Tracing fiber runs with laser and power level testing equipment. Manually tracing cables and fiber runs.

Comcast (Full Time) Nov 2007 - Dec 2022, Senior Engineer, Engineering Operations Maintained Linux servers (Red Hat,) created custom scripts to enhance system efficiency using Bash, Expect, TCL, Perl, and Awk to maintain free disk space, throttle file transfers, monitor for lost connectivity, and mitigate DDOS and other threats to systems.

American Express (Contract position) Dec 2003 - Nov 2007, - Linux Systems Admin / Systems Programmer Financial Systems Production Support: Lead Solaris / Red Hat Linux System Administrator. Provided 24x7 support for Financial applications on Windows / Solaris / Linux. Platforms were built upon Apache Tomcat, Java, Websphere MQ (MQSeries) or other standard frameworks. Application Migration: Assisted in migrating approximately 100 applications to a remote data center.

Agilent Technologies (Contract position) Jun 2002 - Apr 2003, - Application Support / Linux Systems Engineer, Web Programming Online Parts Catalog: eBusiness platform, Server side Javascript, Client side Javascript, HTML, CSS, Oracle on Solaris.

XO Communications (Full Time) 2000 - 2001, - Linux Systems Engineer / Web Programmer Website Programming using the Broadvision platform, e911 engineer.

Toshiba America Information Systems (Full Time) 1995 - 2000,  Linux Engineer, Web Programmer, Product Support Website development: Toshibas eBusiness and eSupport website. Solaris, Red Hat Linux, MS SQL Server.

Updated: May 2024.