Or, how did I get here from there?
I went to Strathclyde University, where I started with Computer Science, but had trouble with the maths. Because of this I moved over to General Science for my third year, this allowed me to pick my subjects so I passed with a good margin. I left with a BSc (Ordinary) in General Science.
After that I went to St Andrew's College of Education (now part of Glasgow University) to do a Post Graduate Certificate in Education - teaching qualification to you and me. Managed that, though came close to being thrown out as I was rather bored with the "computing" course.
I had a few part time jobs at university and college before becoming a supply teacher when I left College. This kept me busy for nearly 2 years before I moved to become a system administrator. The first 2 years of this taught me Sun Solaris 1 (servers and clients), networking, NIS, DNS and Sendmail. It also improved my C Programming and shell scripting (Bourne and C). During the few quiet moments I got a chance to play with the NCSA HTTPd and teach myself HTML as well as playing with INN. Towards the end of these 2 years I found myself looking after a Novell Groupwise mail host as well as learning Microsoft NT 3.51.
Then a Solaris 2 admin was required, there being nobody available I was "chosen" for this, but of course not given training. I did have a couple of months before the systems (servers and clients) were required to be operational, so I had at least a chance to play and learn. I'm happy to say the systems went in on time and met the customer's requirements.
After about a year I left that job, having a few problems with my management and moved over to a quieter job. So quiet I rapidly became bored, but was headhunted and moved within 2 months.
This post was much more interesting. I had some Solaris 2 boxes, some Sequent (now IBM) systems to look after and the prospect of NT soon. On top of that I was expected to become an Oracle DBA. Fortunately my boss was excellent with an incredible knowledge of both Oracle and The Way Things Should Be Done. In the next 3 years we streamlined processes using my knowledge of C, shell scripting and the web. We also designed and implemented a good sized NT domain and Windows Terminal Server farm. Somehow we also managed to find time to assist developers, plan for the future and fit in loads of relevant training. I became a passable Oracle DBA and even managed to get my MCSE (NT, so long expired).
That all died a death though when it was decided we didn't fit the corporate mould. Shame really, we'd managed 100% availability and near total customer satisfaction - something no other area of the IT department had.
After that I spent a couple of years doing penetration testing, which was interesting, but involved far too much time on the road. Moving on from this I spent a couple of years doing some IT Security consultancy and research. Eventually I found my current position, where I design and build distributed Intrusion Detection systems (plus a little system admin work designing and building small networks).
| CSS Menu from CSSplay |
| This page last modified on Saturday, 19 April 2008 21:47 GMT. |