David Brown

Ageo, Saitama, Japan
Phone: +81-90-6549-8110
E-mail: dagbrown@lart.ca

SUMMARY

Experienced architect, sysadmin and software developer with more than 30 years of experience across many varieties of systems seeking new challenges, opportunities and knowledge.

SKILLS

Systems Design

Leveraging a clear understanding of systems and application requirements through communication with application, support and other teams to create cost-effective, efficient and standards-compliant designs. Also reasonably competent at Visio.

Spoken languages

English (mother tongue)
Japanese (daily conversation)

Programming and other Computer languages

Python/Perl/Ruby; JSON/TOML/YAML; Bourne, Korn and C shell; C/C++; FORTRAN; HTML; Java; Common Lisp; Make; PostScript; SQL; XML; many others.

Operating systems

Unix (system administrator and programmer level; including Linux and various other older systems). MS Windows (7, 10, 11, Server 2016/2022/2025/etc). VMWare and other hypervisor systems.

Hardware

Lots of x86/PC experience (mainly server; various manufacturers including Dell, HP, SuperMicro and a few others); Some FPGA

Deployment and Other Technologies

LDAP/Active Directory; Ansible (and Red Hat Ansible Tower); Terraform; AWS and assorted other cloud providers; Red Hat Satellite; assorted others

Certifications

Passed the Japanese IT Standards Examination in April 2006.

EXPERIENCE

Systems Architect and Solutions Engineer

November 2024 - September 2026
Bank of America, Application Solutions and Engineering
Tokyo, Japan

• Technical environment: Datacenters located globally with thousands of servers running a mixture of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server; both physical and virtual servers in a VMWare ESXi environment and assorted network and storage solutions depending on requirements.
• Official duties: Creation of high and low-level design for new and on-going projects requiring new server deployments, including making decisions about what sorts of servers are to be deployed, where to deploy them, and how many servers to deploy.
• Liased with application teams, support and management teams in order to provide the most appropriate solutions to support server-deployment-based projects across multiple environments both production and non-production.
• Leveraged knowledge of a broad array of solutions both within the organization and (where appropriate) outside, to create solutions that conformed to Bank of America resiliency and performance standards in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
• Oversaw and performed server installation in various forms including cloud servers, bare-metal hardware, and OS upgrades both in-place and via migration.
• Provided generous quantities of feedback and advice to team members, senior and junior, seeking to improve or clarify their designs

Systems Administrator, Linux Specialist

October 2022-October 2024
Nomura Securities, High-Frequency Trading team
Tokyo, Japan

• Technical environment: Primarily HP DL380 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but also some VMWare ESXi clouds, Meinberg time devices, and assorted other devices.
• Assessed existing procedures and solutions to evaluate necessity of and create, or discover, areas of improvement.
• Spearheaded the use of in-place Linux upgrade procedures where possible in the bare-metal environments to ensure continuous security compliance levels, leveraging similar procedures developed for other environments.
• Designed and documented said in-place Linux upgrade procedures making use of pre-existing Red-Hat-provided tools wherever possible.
• Made continuous improvements to Linux installation procedures, enabling among other things, simplified hardware purchasing and installation procedures and reducing the risk of human error.
• Developed operating-system-independent hardware monitoring software to enable hardware issues to be detected and rectified before they caused business-affecting outages.
• Created (or discovered) and maintained packaging for some third-party software to ensure consistent installation procedures within the Nomura environment.
• Primary developer of project to replace legacy console server with improved, redundant cloud-based solution to ensure continuity of support for all Linux system administrators throughout the organization.

Systems Administrator

January 2022-June 2022
Spamhaus Technologies, Technical team

• Technical environment: Linux virtual machines on diverse cloud hosting services around the world, plus a physical datacenter using VMWare vSphere
• Evaluated the production environment with an eye to improving data transfer and maintainability
• Built new Linux servers as needed to maintain service levels worldwide

Systems Architect

July 2007-November 2021
GMO Internet, Shared Hosting Product team
Tokyo, Japan

• Technical environment: A production environment consisting of a large collection of SuperMicro servers, mostly running Solaris 10, but with some OmniOS on the storage side. Test environment: mainly Triton SmartOS hypervisor, with VMs running Solaris and Linux depending on their purposes. Desktops were either Linux-based or MacOS, and I did some development work in Visual Basic for an internal Windows system.
• Envisioned and created a template-based configuration management system to ensure consistent configuration across multiple systems and networks.
• Migrated said configuration management to a Git-based workflow, and then later to a Gitlab-based workflow, to ensure consistent configuration across multiple systems.
• Designed and implemented data storage and account migration to support the regular hardware replacement schedule.
• Leveraged the data storage and account migration activity to also provide disaster recovery.
• Introduced standardized software packaging for the ever-increasing number of third-party open-source software tools, again to ensure consistency across different networks, and also to dramatically increase the speed and reliability of system provisioning.
• Created an automated software build-and-packaging system for the third-party tools that needed to be deployed. Basically, I used my experience with Lunar Linux to create a general-purpose software build and packaging system for Solaris. This made us much more responsive when, for example, security vulnerabilities were discovered and updates needed to be deployed quickly.
• Migrated the development and test networks from the previously anarchic collection of Xen VMs and Solaris 10 zones, to a new, standardized SmartOS-based network. While I was at it, I migrated the build, wiki, Gitlab and other servers to the SmartOS environment
• Evaluated the use of the Cloud Linux platform with CPanel, leading to its use in a new large shared hosting environment.
• Integrated and optimized a multiple-account-source LDAP system (separate sources for customer and staff accounts).
• Discovered the once-thought-missing source code for an old but profitable service, and ported it so that it continued to be usable after its original hardware had been retired.
• Spearheaded the use of a Sun x4500 disk storage solution to replace the existing NetApp solution, saving the company tens of millions of yen in hardware cost and millions of yen in support costs.

Programmer/Systems Administrator

February 2005-May 2007 Rightweight Process/Invio/USE, Internet Solutions Division Tokyo, Japan

• Technical environment: A mixed environment, generally with Linux on servers and Linux, Windows and MacOS on desktop. Network equipment was Yamaha, Dell and Cisco. Programming was mainly done in Ruby with Rails, but there was also some PHP, Perl and Python development. My supervisees used Microsoft technologies like C# and .NET.
• Supervised a team of University of Waterloo students, making them immediately productive by implementing a learn-by-doing training program where early results were immediately management- and customer-visible. This fostered a positive relationship between team members and the rest of the company by rapidly demonstrating the quality of their work.
• Quickly identified and capitalized on areas of strength in new employees, leading new team members to be quickly accepted by the rest of the company, and encouraging new employees to quickly take on new and challenging tasks.
• Designed and built a high-performance, high-availability load-balancing network for customer's ad server and discovered inexpensive and simple solutions for subtle problems by investigating and diagnosing performance bottlenecks,
• Performed rapid and effective needs analysis for another service for the same customer. Upon receiving amended requirements for their ad server, quickly perceived their actual requirements based on their requests and clearly explained my perceptions. The customer accepted my amendments to their original request.
• Designed and implemented robust, high-performance email systems, including smart distribution-list management, spam and virus filtering, and email hosting solutions, for both internal and external email customers.
• Worked with a customer to devise an offsite backup solution for their web site, working within the constraints of a hostile environment, which saved the customer large amounts of money and gave them control over their own data.
• Designed and implemented Subversion and Trac systems for intranet, with special exceptions for access by outside contractors.

Developer, build master (volunteer)

2004-present Lunar Linux (Open Source distribution)

• Technical environment: A source-based Linux distribution, like Gentoo but with a curses-based installer rather like Debian or Red Hat.
• After the project had a lengthy hiatus without new install media releases, I took the initiative to figure out how to build the install media, fix what was broken with the build, and institute a daily build.
• Made, reviewed and accepted many pull requests in the distro's Github repositories.
• Mentored several hackers, providing resources and encouraging them to experiment and take risks.

Webmaster (contract)

June 2004-April 2006 XBRL Spy Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

• Technical environment: Apache web server on a hosting service with PHP.
• Researched and recommended content-management software and hosting providers, with a focus on highest quality and maximum flexibility combined with greatest value.
• Rapidly set up the website and its content within the Drupal CMS framework
• Handled system administration tasks including software installation, backup and email management.

Systems Analyst

2003-2004 Blast Radius Products Division
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

• Technical environment: A mixed environment consisting largely of Linux servers and Windows workstations. Most of my own development was in Python on Linux systems, but there was also a large amount of development in C++ and Java within Windows environments.
• Wrote a bug tracker using the Roundup framework to enable Quality Assurance to accurately track problem resolution.
• Authored a lightweight document management system which used out-of-the-box components including SAMBA and DocUtils, enabling the design and development teams to quickly exchange project documentation and information.
• Implemented a system backup and archive scheme to meet government and software release requirements, and to ensure protection of the software development environment.
• Supervised and mentored a practicum student, leading directly to his being hired on a permanent basis in the IT department.
• Administered the development team's Perforce and Subversion source code repositories.
• Provided general IT support for the Products division, including acquiring hardware and software for development, Quality Assurance, and customer-facing demonstrations, and assessing network performance and topology issues.
• Liaised between the Products division and Blast Radius's IT department, ensuring that IT issues were solved in a timely, satisfactory manner.

Prior to 2004

• Did building, packaging and source code management for NCR Corporation in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
• Repaired and reinstalled some less-well-known computers for Mortice Kern Systems in Waterloo.
• Wrote some LISP code as a research assistant at the University of Waterloo.
• Wrote a GUI for the settings file for Advanced Scientific Computing in Waterloo.
• Learned how to be a system administrator at the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo.
• Ran a bunch of HP-UX workstations for scientists working at Environment Canada in Downsview, Ontario.
• Worked in a VMS environment at Labatt Breweries of Canada, providing system and user support.

EDUCATION

• Completed two and a half years of a 4-year Computer Science program at the University of Waterloo.

Open Source projects

• Lunar Linux, a source-based Linux distribution: developer, build master.
• Gurgitate Mail, a mail filter and local delivery agent: creator and lead developer.
• Percolate Mail, an SMTP server framework: creator and lead developer.