Scott Lystig Fritchie August 1999 NOTE: This project list is no longer as useful as it used to be, mainly because several recent employers have had non-disclosure agreements that make it more difficult to say what exactly it was that I worked on. For those people curious about some of the things that I've done professionally, here it is.... Major Projects ============== At Sendmail, Inc. ----------------- Co-designed an extremely-high volume, highly-available messaging server and have started implementation. At HSA Corp ----------- Wrote and started implementing the central data center plans (email, DNS, authentication, and Web-hosting services) and billing and provisioning systems integration. Install and configure UNIX systems, routers, terminal servers, and (to some extent) head-end gear at customer POPs. At MRNet -------- World-Wide Web: Designed MRNet's first plans for higher-availability Web services. Co-designed network specs for co-located server product. Evaluated Microsoft FrontPage 1.0 and discovered serious security flaws. Was a panel member for the Minnesota High Technology Council's seminar "The World-Wide Web: Past, Present, and Future." Created infrastructure for hierarchical Web object caching servers. Co-implemented Windows NT 4.0-based Web server products. Designed & implemented for Web server failure detection and fail-over. Usenet News: Wrote performance enhancements to INN, the leading freely-available Usenet News server software, resulting in an order-of-magnitude performance increase on the same hardware. News feeds to MRNet members is now faster, more reliable, and operates with fewer hardware resources than 1 1/2 years ago. MRNet's primary Usenet server rose from below 600th to as high as 21st in the "Usenet Top 1000" server rankings (http://www.freenix.fr/top1000/). Wrote and submitted paper for USENIX LISA 1997 conference: "The Cyclic News Filesystem: Getting INN To Do More With Less". DNS: Implemented first "trouble ticket" system for MRNet's large DNS support system which was subsequently expanded for problem tracking by other departments. MRNet provides primary and/or secondary DNS service for approximately 8,000 zones. E-mail: Devised flexible system for maintaining Sendmail configurations for multiple-domain e-mail delivery and anti-spam/UCE relay measures. Provide primary support for UUCP customers. Security: Centralized system event log collection (via syslog) and analysis (via logwatcher and swatch), both for UNIX machine and Cisco router system events. Created reliable Tripwire databases for all UNIX machines for system integrity monitoring. Reorganized company-wide use NIS+ to focus only on machines commonly used by most of MRNet's engineers and greatly reduced number of NFS filesystems exported company-wide. Mandated use of SSH (encrypted remote login protocol) and S/Key one-time passwords company-wide. Developed system for consistent system configuration management and OS patch management. Became MRNet's primary distributor of security-related alerts, bulletins, and warnings. Disaster recovery: Expanded use of Legato's Networker for backup of data on MRNet UNIX and NT server as well as customer co-located machines, including regular off-site tape storage. Make periodic "ufsdump" and "tar" backups of critial system partitions to expedite system recovery in event of OS disk(s) failure. Make periodic dumps of system hardware configuration (e.g. memory, peripheral cards, disk partitioning) to ease system duplication or reconstruction. Manage spool of spare CPUs and disk drives, including pre-installation of OS for critical servers and of machines with "flaky" disk drives (to speed recovery from failure). Streamlined Solaris JumpStart procedures for installing custom OS configurations on new machines. Design & implement a management scaffold for minimizing "state-drift" in the configuration and ongoing maintenance of Solaris SPARC, FreeBSD, Digital UNIX, and Solaris x86 machines. Miscellaneous: Participated in the database schema design for a joint Sales/Engineering database to support internal MRNet operations. Volunteered for two weeks to assist the Network Operations Center staff at Networld+Interop (Las Vegas, April 1996; Atlanta, October 1997; Atlanta, October 1998), assisting with a large number of network building, monitoring, troubleshooting, and systems administration tasks. Noteworthy projects before I started at MRNet --------------------------------------------- Wrote distribution system for local operating system customization and patches for flexible management of machine hierarchies as well as per-machine and per-domain exceptions. Wrote StoBase, a simple relational/flat file database system for managing faculty, staff, & student accounts, computing lab access privileges, e-mail aliases, and other administrative functions. Created one of the world's first two interfaces between WWW clients and library cataloging systems, the PALS/WWW Gateway. The code is in production use (with subsequent modifications in the last 3 years by Georgia State University) at http://www-pals.gsu.edu:8001/webpals/. [2003 update: Apparently the WebPALS code is still in use, at least in South Africa. See http://webpals.wcape.gov.za/webpals/history.html -SLF] St. Olaf's World-Wide Web server won Honorable Mention in the Best of the Web 1994 contest, Campus-Wide Information Service category. The contest was held prior to the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web. See: http://www.botw.org/1994/awards/campus.html Designed and implemented a Free-Net for the Twin Cities metropolitan area, with emphasis on community-building across diverse computing platforms and economic strata. Gained experience with writing grant proposals as well as public speaking. Designed and implemented Minnesota's first near-real-time Internet election results reporting for the November 1994 elections. Results of US House, US Senate, state constitutional offices, constitutional amendment, state House, and some county-wide races were available (usually) within 5 minutes of receipt of semi-official vote tallies. Results were retrievable via World-Wide Web, Gopher, e-mail, and FTP. Formerly at http://freenet.msp.mn.us:8094/.