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Nate Carlson

13228 Williamsberg Drive
Savage, MN 55378

Phone: 612.701.2807
Email: work@natecarlson.com
URL: http://www.natecarlson.com
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/in/natecarlson
MSN Messenger: natecars@natecarlson.com
AIM: natecarlsonlptp

Professional Objective

To work for a company where all of my existing skills can be challenged, and where I am constantly inspired to learn new skills. This position should also allow me to lead a team of professionals with a similar objective. I am primarily interested in work in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, but may consider relocation for the right position.

Employment History

Sr. Systems Administrator
Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc. (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota)
May 2005-Present

I was initially hired by Internet Broadcasting as a Systems Administrator for their internal systems. In this role, my main focus was to maintain and improve our existing environment. I am heavily involved in our monitoring infrastructure, our authentication infrastructure, and most other components of our environment. At the end of 2005, I worked with NBC to build up the infrastructure at their data center to host NBC's 2006 Torino Olympics web site. I interfaced with NBC, Sun, and our internal resources to get the environment online. After the success of the Olympics project, we were given the contract for the NBCSports.com web site. In October of 2006, I was promoted to Sr. Systems Administrator, and started working full-time on the NBC Sports project. In this position, I lead the Sports systems team, which also included designing all of the necessary environments for an accelerated development cycle (Development, Staging/Beta, QA, and Production). After the conclusion of the NBC Sports project, I worked with many of the business units within IB to integrate many of the processes we had developed for that environment back into our internal infrastructure. I am currently leading the Systems team for our New Product Development team, where I am architecting and building production environments for each product that we release.

Achievements:

  • Lead Systems Administrator / Systems Architect for our New Products group
  • Team Lead of the Linux System Administration team for the NBCSports.com project
  • Designed and implemented Development, Staging, QA, and Production environments for NBCSports.com. This required over 50 RedHat-Linux based systems outside of our normal environment, and also required virtualization to make best use of the physical hardware available.
  • Implemented Nagios monitoring system for our entire network
  • Stabilized our existing LDAP infrastructure (aging Netscape LDAP servers)
  • Cut over from Netscape LDAP to Active Directory
  • Centralized RPM package management to keep packaging consistent
  • Maintained network of around 300 Linux-based servers
  • Migrated our existing RHEL3 infrastructure to RHEL5
  • Migrated legacy Solaris-based systems to Linux
  • Evaluated and deployed virtualization environment on XenEnterprise
  • Assisted phone and network teams with a physical location move
  • Assisted in a move from PRI-based phone circuits to SIP-based phone circuits from Verizon
  • Assisted Network team with Cisco debugging
  • Deployed environment at NBC for the 2006 Torino Olympics
  • Deployed SAN storage environment for the NBC Sports Dev/QA environment
  • Deployed and maintained multiple environments (Dev, QA, Beta, Production) for NBCSports.com
  • Collaborated with IB's NBC Sports team to properly QA software before releasing it to production
  • Prepared plan to relaunch the NBC Sports site with minimal downtime, and successfully executed the plan
  • Participated in 24x7 on-call rotation; on-call for NBC Sports issues

Consultant/Owner
Nathan Carlson Consulting
Jan 2000-Present

I have been doing some private consulting for quite awhile now. I mainly focus on Linux solutions, but do also venture out into other environments if someone is in need. As part of my consulting business, I also sublet colocation space to try to make colo affordable to geeks who want to get a system up in a stable environment. My consulting work is limited to outside of my regular job's hours, and is primarily done remotely.

Achievements:

  • Invested in a full rack at a local ISP, and sold colocation to people around the country.
  • Maintained a local company's Linux server infrastructure, phone systems, and Windows workstastions.
  • Assisted a few local companys in a cutover from standard digital phones to VoIP-based systems, and also in cutting over from TDM-based phone lines to VoIP.

Sr. Network Engineer / Sr. Systems Administrator
Real Time Enterprises, Inc.
October 1999-April 2005

Real Time Enterprises is a small local company that offers ISP services and computer/network consulting services. At Real Time, I was responsible for administration of both our internal networks and many of our client's networks. I also researched and implemented many leading-edge solutions for us and our clients. During my tenure at Real Time, I also wrote and presented two sessions at our Minneapolis-area Linux Conferences.

Achievements:

  • Administration of Real Time's networks
  • Administration of our client's networks
  • Extensive pre- and post-sale work with our sales people.
  • Provided Level 3 tech support for our clients
  • Performed various network security audits
  • Implemented Snort for intrusion detection on multiple networks
  • Implemented LDAP-based authentication for many of our clients
  • Implemented a monitoring strategy for our local and wide-area networks, along with many customer's networks
  • Researched and implemented various types of VPN's, including PPTP, IPSec, and SSL-based VPN's
  • Wrote and presented seminar on Linux on the Desktop for Real Time's 2000 Linux Conference
  • Wrote and presented seminar on Basic Linux Security for Real Time's 2001 Linux Conference
  • Designed and implemented cutover plan to renumber around 4000 hosts (including all of our servers) to a new range of IP addresses with minimal interruption
  • Researched and implemented secure wireless networks using a VPN transport to overcome WEP weaknesses.
  • Set up High-Availability solutions for various clients using Heartbeat and ldirectord on Linux platforms. Also using DRBD for disk replication.
  • Secondary contact for 24x7 on-call rotation.

Network Engineer
Bethany Press International
August 1997-September 1999

Implemented Linux-based mail, web, and database servers. Supported Novell Netware and Windows NT servers, along with Windows-based workstations. Designed a web application that tied a SQL database to their existing Visual Foxpro application for job order status, and allowed customers to access real-time job data over the internet.

PC Technician / Systems Administrator
Miatec Computers, Inc.
July 1996-July 1997

Built PC's, hardware troubleshooting and repair, remote network installations (everything from pulling and terminating cable to installing servers and workstations), web site design for the company, and system administration on Linux, NT, and Novell platforms.

Education

  • High School Education, July 1999
    Southwest Christian High School

Group Memberships

  • Twin Cities Linux User's Group (TCLUG)
  • Twin Cities PHP User's Group (TCPHP)
  • USENIX
  • USENIX's System Administrator's Guild (SAGE)

Skills with various products

Communications

  • CPE-side of Telco Circuits (DS1/DS3/Gig-E WAN/etc) (Expert)
  • VoIP (SIP, IAX, etc.) (Advanced)

Hardware

  • Cisco IOS-based devices (Advanced)
  • Dell Hardware (Expert)
  • F5 BigIP (Advanced)
  • F5 3DNS (Advanced)
  • HP BladeSystem, p- and c-Class (Advanced)
  • Sun SPARC and X86-based systems (Intermediate)
  • Wireless Networking (Various Vendors, 802.11a/b/g/n, WPA, etc) (Expert)

Content Distribution Networks

  • Akamai (Used at Internet Broadcasting) (Advanced)

Network/Routing Protocols

  • BGP: Configured and maintained (Advanced)
  • IPSec (Expert)
  • IPv4 (Expert)
  • IPv6 (Intermediate)

Operating Systems

  • Linux: Used for ~10 years on a daily basis; all major distributions (Expert)
  • Solaris: Used primarily for NBC Olympics (Advanced)
  • Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista (Advanced)
  • AIX (Beginner)
  • HPUX (Beginner)

Specific Linux Distributions

  • Debian (Expert)
  • RHEL Redhat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, and 5 (Expert)
  • Fedora Core 6, 7 (Advanced)
  • Ubuntu (Advanced)
  • SuSe (Intermediate)

Virtualization Technologies

  • Xen OSS (Advanced)
  • Xen Enterprise (Expert)
  • VMware Workstation and Server (Advanced)
  • VMware ESX (Intermediate)

Programming/Scripting Languages

  • Bash (Advanced)
  • Perl (Advanced)
  • PHP (Advanced)
  • HTML (Advanced)
  • XML/XSL (Intermediate)

Software

  • Microsoft Active Directory (Advanced)
  • Apache (Expert)
  • Asterisk (Advanced)
  • DNS (Bind, PowerDNS, Microsoft DNS Server) (Expert)
  • DRBD (Disk replication) (Advanced)
  • Heartbeat (Linux HA) (Advanced)
  • ldirectord (Open-source load balancing solution) (Advanced)
  • MTA's (Sendmail, Postfix) (Expert)
  • NIS/NFS/YP (Expert)
  • Openswan (Expert)
  • Redhat Cluster Suite (Advanced)
  • LVM2 (Advanced)
  • Samba (Expert)

Storage

  • EMC CLARiiON (Advanced)
  • NetApp (Intermediate)
  • NexSan SAN Appliances (Advanced)
  • Brocade SAN switches (Advanced)
  • Fibre Channel (including zoning, multipathing) (Advanced)

Hobbies

  • Hanging out with my wife, friends, and family
  • Playing with new technology
  • Tweaking my home theatre setup (MythTV rules!)
  • Photography
  • Playing with my dog

Miscellany

What really can't be captured in a simple resume format is my ability to quickly learn new skills and abilities. Whether in an emergency case where I need to learn and implement a new technology as soon as possible, or if it's just a technology I am researching for possible future use, I am able to become proficient in a very short timeframe. I should also note that I haven't nearly covered everything I have done in this resume - if you are looking for something specific, please feel free to ask. Thanks for your consideration!

Last modified 15 November 2007.


Copyright © 2007 by Nate Carlson.

All rights reserved. This document may be copied and redistributed freely, but modification is allowed only if the resulting document does not purport to be the canonical résumé of the same Nate Carlson who authored the original version of this document.