Work Stuff

• My first job in SEAS was sysadmin for the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1988. I managed Sun and Macs, mainly.
• In 1990 I took over the administration of Eniac, and dropped the non-unix part of my job in EE.
• I added responsibility for the unix machines in the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter in 1996.
• Then in 1998 I replaced Mark Foster as lead systems administrator for the Department of Computer and Information Science, in addition to the rest. I'm now primarily a manager, although I still do some hands on administration.
• I'm a SEAS alumnus, with a BAS/CS
• Before I worked for SEAS, I worked for Conrail (doing APL and a little FORTRAN), Penn's Planning and Analysis group (which later morphed into HEFRI), Girard Bank (which was bought out by Mellon), Aydin Controls (where I worked on the software for a CAD/CAM system), and Penn's Med School in the CCEB (Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Bio-Statistics).
• My desktop at work is a P500 running NT. I used to have an xterm, but now that I'm a manager I need to work with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, so I needed to get a Windows machine. My home machine is a P133 running Windows 98, but I mostly just use it for SSH. My MUA is MH. My editor is emacs, but I frequently use vi for quick jobs.
• My approach to Systems Administration is
  1. Develop a policy describing the services provided
  2. Develop procedures to implement those policies
  3. Write programs to automate those procedures

  Automation increases customer satisfaction by allowing them to get things done themselves rather than having to ask someone to do it for them. It also frees the support staff for things that can't be automated, like answering questions, providing new services, and handling special cases.

  Here's some of the software I've designed to automate systems administration tasks.