Things Chris Is Good At

Linux expert since 1998 administering all varieties of Linux systems, Gentoo, Red Hat, Centos, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, OpenWrt, et al. Extensive experience with creating custom kernels.

Benchmarking (have my own CPU benchmark). Extensive experience testing electrical power consumption in high performance computing equipment.

MySQL installation, tuning, back up, and use. Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQLite experience. Advanced database programming.

Physical planning and installation of enterprise server room hardware including cabling, power management, and network provisioning.

Research, design, procure, build, configure, install, maintain, and troubleshoot custom high performance storage and computing hardware.

Advanced cluster management including experience with Usher Virtual Cluster Management System and Eucalyptus Cloud (I managed the first installation of usher.ucsd.edu). Created my own minimal Linux distribution entirely from scratch to facilitate the distribution of operating systems in a cluster environment.

RAID design, configuration, and testing. Experience developing custom monitoring and notification tools to ensure continuous functionality storage hardware. Custom software to monitor SMART System hard drive feedback. Custom software for hard drive space usage monitoring and quota management.

Experience designing and implementing advanced custom back up solutions using non-proprietary auditable software.

Extensive experience with virtual machine technology. Extensive experience with Xen running Linux including dom0 and guest installation, configuration, migration, and management. Also experienced with VMWare and Parallels running a variety of systems.

Server management, installation, and troubleshooting using PXE, serial console, IPMI. Extensive experience with managed power strips and aggregating console server appliances.

Install and manage Torque/PBS. Wrote my own batch job dispatching system for a cluster environment. Familiar with MapReduce and Hadoop.

Uptime and performance monitoring using Ganglia, web-based services such as Pingdom, and custom solutions.

TCP/IP networking configuration and management. Router and VLAN configuration.

Expert networking troubleshooting skills using tcpdump, Wireshark, and other tools.

Complete NFS server and client configuration and optimization. Samba server configuration.

Installation and advanced configuration of Apache in various Linux environments including virtual host configuration, log management and analysis, and security.

Experience running and configuring the following services: BIND DNS, sendmail, ftp, tftp, ntp, NIS.

Extensive experience configuring printers and print servers.

Advanced OpenLDAP server installation and configuration to provide secure authentication and other directory services. Complete client configuration to integrate with an LDAP server.

Advanced firewall configurations using iptables. Experience with arpwatch.

Tripwire and custom intrusion/error detection systems (wrote a much faster one myself). Experience with root kit detection and eradication.

CGI web software security auditing. (Google Perl CGI security, I’m #3.)

Password vulnerability testing and management, experience configuring the Linux authentication system and PAM. Auditing network traffic for insecurities.

OpenSSL/TLS configuration and certificate management. Experience running a FLEXlm license server.

Complete SSH expertise required for server configuration and custom client solutions for special user requirements and secure automated transactions.

Advanced volume configuration NFS-root, LVM, Nexenta ZFS, loop devices. Experience with filesystem encryption and management of encrypted data.

Comfortable with PGP encrypted mail and experienced with other encryption software.

Expert at Linux-specific programming issues. Experienced programming Xlib directly.

Experience establishing version control facilities for a work group using a CVS secure public pserver, Subversion, and Mercurial.

Experience creating Makefiles, compiler tuning, and gdb debugging.

Skilled at creating documentation and man pages.

Bash - Advanced scripting and complete program development using Bash and traditional Unix tools.

Extensive experience with C++ and using the Standard Template Library. Integrating C/C++ code with SWIG.

Expert level Python development with comprehensive knowledge of classes, exception handling, decorators, modules, parsing, object serialization, GUI and graphics, callbacks, etc. Experience developing network services with Twisted. Experienced Python teacher and author of a popular series of Python lessons (Google Python Lessons, I’m #2).

Competent in other languages such as Perl, Postscript, Lisp, Tcl/Tk, Javascript, Go.

Extensive experience with 3d modelling and vector math. Some experience with OpenGL.

Solid foundation in computer science and software design, with strong competencies in data structures, algorithms, asynchronous programming, networked systems, and programming language design.

Data mining, web-crawling technology.

Machine learning experience including clustering, classifiers, support vector machines, regression analysis, and other techniques.

Expert on regular expressions.

Skilled at database design, normalization, and tuning.

Analysis of storage archive integrity using probabilistic simulations of media failure.

Experience with PDB and other biological and chemical databases.

Experience using and scripting molecular viewer software PyMol, ICM.

Understanding of X-ray crystallography and the protein structure determination process.

Experience with protein visualization. Wrote a modular C++ program to generate protein secondary structure diagrams, and web interface for it. Used Graphviz to generate network representations of proteins.

Experience with developing a web-based collaborative knowledgebase for protein annotation. One of the founders of The Open Protein Structure Annotation Network.

Created a comprehensive, general-purpose, object-oriented parser for extracting any data from a PDB file. This Python library was useful in finding hundreds of incorrectly formatted entries in the PDB.

Academic background in Engineering Statistics and Operations Research, specializing in discrete simulation analysis. (BS Degree in Industrial Engineering.)

CAD expert (advanced AutoCAD user since 1988, currently writing my own CAD system).

Senior manufacturing engineer and skilled machinist with 7 years experience specializing in exotic CNC programming on large scale machined parts.