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I currently work at the University of Wollongong
in Information Technology Services otherwise known as ITS. I have been
working here since Oct 1999 and before that I was working at an ISP in Townsville.
My title at the UOW is Network and Systems Management Officer. I make sure
that all the systems are running, assist in the day to day running of the network and central
systems. Monitor and notify of outages and unscheduled downtime. This means I could be doing
compiling up a new version of bind. Or trying to figure out why every 120th packet to the machine
X doesn't get to it's destination. I also maintain the universities central monitoring system
(Nagios) this currently monitors over 300 different devices and
about 40 different services (not counting the mandatory ping service). So if any of the network/systems
on campus go down or become flaky, we generally know about it within 5 minutes and can fix or bypass the
problem!
I also help to diagnose and fix problems in the entire campus computer network. So if there is a
networking problem in another part of the campus, I'm one of a few people who will respond to those
problems. These kind of problems can be anything from a hub (yes we still use hubs in places)
that stops transmitting frames that are larger than 788 bytes, to a fiber cable that a rat has had for
lunch.
On a good day I'm playing around tinkering with new toys, or writing some code to make my life easier so
I can go back to tinkering with new toys :). There is one sure way to keep a geek such as myself happy,
give me hi-tech toys, like palm pilots, laptops, IP phones (I personally like the Cisco IP phones as features
in the west wing!. I want to hack one of them so i can read slashdot headlines via the phone :)
Well thats about it for a work point of view. I do lots of stuff, but you'll be able to see a more
detailed overview of what I do by looking at my skills page. There I have a list of things I know
and work on etc.
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