Personal Information

Full Name

Benjamin Austin Roberts

Date of Birth

09/09/1986

Location

Hampshire, United Kingdom

Email Address

{mailto address="me@benroberts.net" encode="hex"}

Portfolio

https://www.benroberts.net/

Employment

1. GSA Capital Partners LLP November 2012 - Present

   Systems Administrator

   • Managing Unix, Linux and Windows systems, networking and datacentre deployment.
   • IT Support.

2. Atos IT Services UK July 2010 - November 2012

   Network Technical Specialist - Major Projects

   • Design and implementation of network solutions for Atos customers in the Transport and Financial Services industries.
   • Lead planner for all physical aspects of 5-datacentre core infrastructure upgrade including WAN circuit delivery, rack and equipment placement, power & network connectivity, build validation, and logistics management for ~3000 items of hardware.
   • Designed, built and operated a large development lab for validation of a large-scale internal project, containing:
     • ~70 mixed-vendor devices across 8 fully populated, full-sized racks
     • 500 copper & fibre connections
     • >2.5km of network cabling
   • Installation, configuration and maintenance of an out of band management service for remote console access to hundreds of core infrastructure devices across multiple datacentres and unmanned sites.
   • On-call proximity support, providing out-of-hours coverage for any incidents requiring a hands-on activity at the local data centre.

3. Netcraft June 2008 - May 2009

   Internet Services Developer

   • Penetration testing of web applications and hardware devices for large financial institutions.
   • Development of a perl/sql based data mining survey.
   • Take-downs of phishing sites (via legal channels), and other anti-phishing related activities.
   • Windows Server/Active Directory/Exchange administration (including migrations to newer hardware/operating system versions).

4. NXP Semiconductors June 2007 - September 2007

   Student Intern

   • Maintained and extended an existing internal web application using PHP and Perl.
   • Installion and configuration of a streaming video-on-demand server on Red Hat Linux, with embedded Linux clients running on set-top boxes.

5. School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton September 2006 - June 2010

   Helpdesk Assistant

   • Working in the University's Computer Science Helpdesk on an ad-hoc basis, performing day-to-day tasks to help the full-time System Administrators. This included repairing and reinstalling the operating systems on lab PCs.

Certification

Education

1. University of Southampton October 2005 - June 2010

   Subject	Level	Grade
   Computer Science with Distributed Systems and Networks	MEng	First Class

2. Uckfield Community Technology College September 2003 - June 2005

   Subject	Level	Grade
   Mathematics	A-Level	A
   Physics	A-Level	A
   Computing	A-Level	A
   Further Mathematics	AS-Level	B

Skills

Networking

Experience with:

• Routing and Switching (Cisco, Brocade, Mikrotik)
• Firewalling (Cisco FWSM, ASA, Linux iptables)
• VPNs (Juniper, OpenVPN, Mikrotik)

Experience configuring and operating network services, including:

• DHCP (ISC)
• Resilient DNS (BIND, Windows Server)
• Resilient LDAP (OpenLDAP)
• HTTP (Apache, IIS)
• SSL CA (OpenSSL)
• Logging (Syslog, Splunk)

System Administration

Experience with:

• Installation, configuration and operation of Operating Systems (Linux [many distributions], Windows, Mac OS X)
• Writing and maintaining Linux software packages and package repositories (Gentoo Portage, Sabayon Entropy, RPM)
• System automation (Puppet, Molecule, Kickstart)
• Virtualisation (KVM, libvirt, Ganeti, VMWare/ESX)
• Monitoring (Nagios, Icinga, and automation of monitoring deployments)
• Backup systems (BackupPC, Bacula)

Brief experience with Active Directory, Group Policy and Exchange administration on Windows-based systems and integration with Linux systems via LDAP.

Web Programming

Proficient at creating standards-compliant, cross-browser (X)HTML documents, with CSS styling, and dynamic JavaScript behaviour. Many years' experience creating both simple and complex dynamic systems using PHP. Emphasis on writing secure code.

More recently, experience with Python and Django.

Application Programming

Proficient with C/C++, Qt. Basic experience with Perl. Able to read and write many other languages, including Java, Ruby and UNIX Shell scripting.

Databases

Experienced with SQL, including database normalisation. Installation and operation of MySQL DBMS.

Development Tools

Experience with:

• IDEs (KDevelop, Eclipse SDK, Microsoft Visual Studio)
• UNIX build environments (Vim, gcc/g++, make)
• Version Control systems (Git, Subversion)

Interests

I am a supporter of the opensource movement, and try to use free/libre software and code where I can. I also release all my code under free licenses where possible in the hope that they might be useful to others.

I enjoy developing many small systems for both personal and educational use. Aside from the projects listed on my personal website, in the past I have also written a web-based remote control for WinAMP, and "audio emoticon" software for use with MSN Messenger, which was downloaded more than a million times.

At University I was in a group named "CSLib" (Computer Science Library), which maintained a centralised software repository for other students in the department. This involved building and maintaining software, often compiled from source. It also involves managing a Windows 2003 Terminal Server for remote use by other students.

My third year individual project was to design and implement a cross platform document sharing system which featured zero-configuration peer discovery, and password-less, decentralised authentication whilst maintaining privacy and security.