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Jon Gefaell
(408) 431-7923
Fremont, CA
jon@Turing.ORG

Summary of Qualifications

Expert in UNIX & Network Systems Administration with long term and comprehensive experience. Designed, built & maintained datacenter environments. Extensive experience with security, email, dns, provisioning, monitoring, capacity planning, business continuity and other aspects of datacenter operations.

Employment History

Infrastructure Architect, Operations Manager
Philotic/Causes.COM - Berkeley, CA. March 2009 - Current
A very small company with a lot of users (30MM+ MAU). Causes is one of Facebook's leading applications. I took responsibility for the entire operations arena as the sole engineer. I launched an effort to acheive order and best practices in the environment. My goal was to reduce outages and improve Reliablity, Availability and Servicability.

  • Responsible for operating systems provisioning, monitoring, operational troubleshooting, datacenter tools and services infrastructure.
  • Built infrastructure including kickstart, puppet, nagios/cacti w/ snmp
  • Built reliable and scalable mail cluster to handle 30MM mails a day
  • Migrated services to new public IP block, new load balancer configs
  • Negotiated specifications and contract for new Datacenter, IP Transit

  • Senior Unix Systems Engineer
    Yahoo! Inc. - Sunnyvale, CA. March 2007 - February 2009
    Member of a small team of Systems Administrators responsible for Yahoo's global UNIX and DNS systems Administration for Yahoo! worldwide.

  • Responsible for operating systems provisioning, operational troubleshooting, datacenter tools and services infrastructure.
  • Servers are a mix of FreeBSD and RHEL GNU/Linux on various x86 platforms from small to very large.
  • Specialized in Global Traffic Management and general troubleshooting.

  • Global Infrastructure Architect (Consultant)
    Network Appliance, Inc. - Sunnyvale, CA. March 2006 - March 2007
    Reported to Senior Manager of Global Infrastructure as a member of the management team.

  • Review and analyze worldwide operations and IT infrastructure in areas such as NOC, systems availability and performance monitoring, directory services, email, secure remote access, systems enrollment, OS and Applications provisioning, patching and Maintenance.
  • Review and Recommend new processes and toolsets for comprehensive ITIL integration.
  • Project Lead for IBM/Tivoli, Opsware and other key initiatives.
  • Member of Infrastructure Architecture Review Board. Reviewed and approved Enterprise Change Management requests and workflow.

  • Senior UNIX and Network Systems Engineer (Datacenter Architect)
    Netblue, Inc. - Mountain View, CA. May 2004 - January 2006
    Sole systems engineer for rapidly growing internet advertising company

  • Started with existing datacenter operations in 4 ISP Cabinets with ~25 hosts running mostly Redhat 7.2.
  • Enhanced security of operations with wide implementation of ssh/scp.
  • Introduced sudo and other methods to restrict and audit access.
  • Created an automated NOC utilizing redundant servers with Nagios, Perfparse, Cacti, NTOP, Syslog-NG & Logwatch for remote logging & analysis.
  • Host and services provisioned through Kickstart and other automated means.
  • Implemented and Utilized Trac Wiki for Change Management, SVN for source management.
  • Automated backups of infrastructure systems using rsync over ssh.
  • Implemented network and server security with bastion hosts, firewalled network access through host IPTables and Cisco network gear.
  • Provisioned HDS SAN, ISCI equipment & various hardware and software RAID schemes.
  • Programmed Cisco WebNS for load balancing with persistence & redundancy for ~50 websites and other services.
  • Provided on call 24/7 NOC support.
  • Migrated main operations to new datacenter with 6 custom racks in a cage. At the time of my departure there were over 100 CentOS GNU/Linux servers in three locations and three additional Systems Engineers who provide datacenter services which advance key business projects.

  • Senior Consulting Engineer
    Apple Computer - Atlanta, GA. February 2002 - February 2003
    Member of a team providing an overlay of Enterprise UNIX server expertise to Apple's Educational Sales Field Organization.

  • Developed and provided training for Apple's systems engineers and account executives to help them understand and sell Unix servers.
  • Worked with sales teams  to identify and pursue significant opportunities.
  • Developed and delivered presentations and demonstrations to key customers achieving significant success in demonstrating enterprise capability for Apple's UNIX server products.

  • Senior Systems Engineer
    Napster, Inc. - Redwood City, CA. January 2001 - January 2002
    Senior member of Team responsible for design and operations of the server farm.

  • Created reliable, high performance web server farm.
  • Supported large server farm with over 1.7M concurrent users sharing over 280M files
  • Daily operational support of infrastructure (nfs, dns, dhcp, etc...)
  • Linux systems for website(s), napster servers, various infrastructure.

  • Staff Engineer
    Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Mountain View, CA. February 2000 - December 2000
    Converted from contract to regular position. Accepted responsibility as Staff Engineer for all aspects of partner software engineering for Solstice Backup (SBU) product including sustaining product support and new product development.

  • Successfully completed entire major product release lifecycle (front to end) with the release of SBU version 6.0.
  • Participated as member of W-team to coordinate Product development, Customer support, manufacturing and marketing efforts.
  • Authored product Engineering plans, Marketing Requirements Definitions,
  • Responsible for all bugs and engineering escalations.
  • Directed other engineer(s).

  • Contract Positions
    Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Mountain View, CA. February 1996 - February 2000

  • Lead Engineer. Responsible for management of escalated customer support issues. Developed workarounds and product fixes for problems without existing resolutions. Managed Information necessary to coordinate Product development and Customer support efforts.
  • Quality Assurance & System Test Group.Responsible for the testing of Fibre Channel & SCSI hardware RAID devices and software including drivers, GUI management tools, RAID Management software and Veritas Volume Manager/File System. Authored & Developed Test Plans. Automated procedures through jumpstart and rc scripts. Managed group lab.
  • Lead Quality Engineer to perform system software and hardware testing for UltraSparc/AX system board for OEMs. Developed and implemented Test Plans providing 'go-nogo' decisions for product development and marketing.
  • Provided Internet software and hardware expertise to team developing Internet software and HTML/CGI based administration tools. Ported and built various packages to be integrated to products. Managed project lab. Supported Sustaining Engineering for previous product version.

  • Senior Systems Engineer
    Healtheon, Inc. - Palo Alto, CA. July 1996 - December 1996
    Responsible for initial installation and administration of highly secure and available web site, corporate and development environments

  • Installed and configured Gauntlet firewall, Split DNS, NIS with Automount, ISDN and remote access using PortMaster, RADIUS and SecurID token cards.
  • Procured DLT/Legato tape system for database (Informix), UNIX and Windows workstations backups and archival.
  • Worked with Network Engineer to plan and implement network topology for complex multi server facility utilizing multi-homed hosts, Cisco routers and high speed ethernet switches. Renumbered internal networks and migrated from ISDN to T1 Internet connection.

  • Co-Founder & Chief Architect
    Cornerstone Networks - Charlottesville, VA. July 1995 - December 1996
    Co-Founded Internet Service Provider business.

  • Designed and implemented complete system including T1 IP connection, dial-in lines, dedicated client networks, accounting and billing interface.
  • Full services include DNS, Web, FTP and Mail services (with Virtual Domain support) for a mixed consumer and commercial clientele.
  • Equipment included Cisco routers, USR modems, Sparc/SunOS and Pentium/Linux.
  • Business was subsequently sold to a telephone company.

  • Computer Systems Engineer
    University of Virginia - Charlottesville, VA. January 1985 - November 1995
    Responsible for datacommunications for Administrative Computing Services

  • 1994 - 1995 Designed and implemented community network for county and city government. Project provides Internet access and presence for regional non-profit and government service organizations as well as numerous public use facilities in regional library system.
  • 1993 - 1994 The Hopper project. A public access Internet experiment. (see below; Turing Project)
  • 1993 - 1993 Special Project, Multicast IP Experiments. Created multicast router and application platform for real time audio/video experiments over MBONE meta-network.
  • 1992 - 1994 Netware Lead Support Engineer; lead group of 6 engineers and technicians in the management and support of the campus wide 180 server internetwork. Directly responsible for 24 servers within computer center facilities. Upgraded many systems to 3.x.
  • 1991 - 1992 Designed and implemented statewide network for Continuing Education Division. Over 250 stations at 7 regional centers were connected with Proteon routers and 56Kbps links, and then connected to Internet at UVA. The Centers used SNA, Netware and IP protocols.
  • 1990 - 1991 Installed TCP/IP on IBM SYS/370 to provide FTP and TN3270 services.
  • 1989 - 1990 Designed, implemented and managed 80 station Token Ring network with Netware file and print servers, 3270 gateway, application programs (Wordperfect, Lotus, Dbase, etc?)
  • 1988 - 1991 Continued responsibility for rapidly growing VTAM/SNA network (Now 1250+ nodes).
  • 1987 Began migration to PC based 3270 emulation products.
  • 1986 Responsible for large (750+ node) VTAM/SNA network with local and remote 3270 terminals and printers.
  • 1985 Responsible for processing daily jobs, input and output. Designed and implemented new online system for job submission and review, still in use as of 2002.