System Environment: Netware 4.10, 4.10 SFTIII, 4.11, 5, SCO Unix, Caldera Linux.

The Trans-World Group comprises a group of companies that buy Aluminium and Steel (and sundry other metals) from former Soviet Bloc countries and trade them on the world market. The group also contains other companies involved in shipping, ports, materials handling, engineering and property. During my time there I have grown the department to 5 (including self), to handle users support (2), development and systems administration. Currently we have a user population of 150 spread across 2 countries, with another office due for installation in August.

I was brought in to take over maintenance and development of existing trading and office systems. Trading system a bespoke application written in Business Basic running on dumb terminals on SCO Unix. Due to a complete lack of any documentation no further work could take place on the system.

• Consulted with users to write business and functional specifications for new trading system. Decided that due to the small size of the company (at that time 25 people in London, 5 in New York. 3 traders) that it would not be cost effective to develop new system from scratch so investigated market to find suitable package that could be customised. Package chosen was RingMaster.



• Implemented a network to support Ringmaster and office applications. This consisted of a Netware 4.10 server, a PC for each user running a standard build of Windows 3.11 with office applications (MS Office, cc:Mail, Organizer, Ringmaster) pre-configured. Wrote procedures for automating the loading of PC�s.



• Wrote a set of table driven conversion utilities to allow data from old trading system to be migrated across to RingMaster.



• Wrote the specification for a telex and fax system for the shipping company. Sourced a suitable hardware and software combination and integrated it into our network, feeding all incoming and outgoing telexes through to printers, an archive log and into cc:Mail for the users.



• Due to the increased size of the company and the increasing reliance on IT, I felt it prudent to devise a strategy to try and remove the risks associated with the failure of any single piece of critical equipment. I migrated the server to Netware 4.10 SFTIII.



• When Trans-World opened an office in Geneva I installed a network in there which was managed from London, initially using ISDN for routing.



• Installed a network in our New York office, similar to that in London and Geneva.



• For commonality we wished to use the same trading software in New York as London. It found to be necessary to share some of the data in real-time, so I planned and implemented a Frame-Relay based WAN linking London, Geneva, New York and Pittsburgh with all of the network infrastructure centrally managed from London.



• Due to the increased size of the company in London (about 120 active users), we introduced two more servers to handle the extra data being generate. These used overnight data mirroring to provide an extra level of redundancy.



• Integrated a Linux server onto the network so that the remaining data from the previous trading software could be made available to some applications, and hosted on the Netware servers.



• Due to the position of the building (on the corner or Old Street and City Road), it was felt that there was a risk of disruption to the business should a major incident happen. All the telecoms had been handled by C&W. I took over control of telecoms and negotiated with Worldcom for the supply of a fibre to be brought into the building at a point opposite the C&W one. Moving traffic across to Worldcom (and later Frontier as well) also reduced our call costs by 50%.



• Following on from this I wrote a proposal for disaster recovery utilising an off-site server to mirror data overnight.



• Apart from laptops, we deliberately kept all users running W3.11 in order to keep a standardised software configuration. I proposed that we switch over to NT to alleviate the deficiencies in 3.11. During the time that it took to get the proposal accepted, NT had moved from 3.51 to 4.



• The original plan that I wrote for the NT workstation migration envisaged upgrading the memory & disk in most of the existing machines, however a combination of falling hardware prices and the low bundled price of NT4 with a new machine made it cost effective to replace the base units of all the machines. The plan called for users to go off in groups of 24 for migration training, at which point there machines were replaced with boxes preloaded with our standard NT4 build. Throughout the network all applications (currently numbering about 100) are distributed using Novell�s Zenworks. Before the migration this was a manual process dealt with by the helpdesk requiring a large amount of work. The project was completed on time and below budget.



• Introduced network scanners for general purpose scanning (non office originated documents that have to go to other offices can be routed directly to a distant printer) and input to the fax servers, allowing least cost routing on outbound faxes.

Hardware

Server installation & configuration

Peripheral (tape drives & disk installation from raw)

Routers

Print servers

Network Scanner

Smartcard readers

Backup devices

Network Switches

Software

Netware

Installation, configuration, stress & stability testing, performance tuning, router configuration

Btrieve

Configuration & maintenance

Oracle

Installation & configuration

Zenworks

Installation, Client configuration, Application build "re-writing"

Configuration of application scripts for closest machine loading (single application build, seamless international distribution)

Bespoke conversion utilities (C)

Shellscripts

Cc:Mail

Installation, configuration, maintenance

Miscellaneous electronic banking systems

installation & configuration

NT (Client & W/S)

Installation, configuration, security policies, application installation & configuration

Unix (SCO & Linux)

Installation & configuration, Kernel tuning, bespoke backup system, internetworking Linux & Netware

Ghost

Set up automated procedures for loading NT Workstation (bootable disk)

Telephone System (SDX Index 800)

Programming & routing design

LAN & WAN

Physical infrastructure design

NDS Design

Application integration with NDS

Networking Technologies

10Base5, 10Base2, 10BaseT, 100BaseT, Frame Relay, ISDN, X25, IP, IPX

System Environment: SCO UNIX & XENIX, unreleased kernel sources libraries.

Developed a multi-lingual systems audit disk to be used by customers to check that all the elements of their systems software are the correct version. The disk could also be used to return the relevant licensing information back to SCO so that large end-users can ensure that their systems are correctly licenced.

Software

Bespoke application, using unreleased (and undocumented) libraries for screen handling.

C

Shellscripts (Bourne)

For two and a half years I was leading a team of five people who were doing all of Quadratron's development and maintenance for their UNIX software. This involved work not just on their current range of software but also on older products which required maintenance releases for some customers.

• Apart from maintenance and development of the character terminal implementation this also involved the development of the X11/Motif version from a technology demonstrator version to a fully released product.



• This was done using a single common source base for UNIX character, X11, DOS character and Windows 3 environments. At the same time we also had to ensure that this source base (of approximately 750,000 lines of C code) would port automatically and reliably to all of the necessary machines (about 50 different types at that time).



• Wrote a system to synchronize multi-site development work on a common source base.



• Managed the master source tree, resolving where necessary coding conflicts between programmers in different countries.

Software

C

Motif

X11

Shellscripts (Korn, Bourne & C)

UUCP

SCCS

As one of the original 3 founders of Quadratron UK, I was employed as Technical Manager for approximately 6 and a half years. During this time my duties included supporting customers, providing support to other Quadratron offices, helping manufacturers with integration work, development work, porting etc.

The last major project I managed was an 18 month development project for the EEC. This involved myself running a team of people to modify our software to the requirements of the Commission, and then port it on to all of their supported platforms. This became a standard software product within the Commission, with about 8000 users, another 12000 were projected over the 5 year lifespan of the project. Work for the commission also involved advising them on security and on hardware and software tuning.

Porting the software consumed varying amounts of my time over the six years. Because of the large size of the source code, approximately 600,000 lines, I frequently ran into problems with compiler & OS bugs. These had to be tracked down so that I could go back to the manufacturer and know that I could can prove to them where the problem lay. Because of this work I have gained a good working knowledge of many different machines and their operating systems.

Because of our involvement with the CCTA's MITSY project I was working very closely with AT&T's Federal Systems Division from very early on in their development cycle for System V/MLS (A B2 secure UNIX). The CCTA ultimately decided not to proceed with Systems V/MLS, but before that point had been reached all of the necessary design and development work had been completed on our product to run in this environment.

As a company we were frequently asked by manufacturers to help them with their bids for major projects, these would involve us working very closely with the manufacturers to tune their machines to run our software as efficiently as possible.

Hardware

Over 100 different unix machines from about 40 different manufacturers

Software

PCL

Postscript

C

Tar & Cpio etc.

Programmers Toolchest

LAN & WAN

TCP/IP

OSI protocols

I was employed on a fixed term contract to the European Space Agency. This involved the design of a new satellite control front end systems for the satellite controllers. Up until this time every controller had a glass tty and a Tektronix' terminal. This imposed a heavy workload on the two main Gould minicomputers so it was decided to replace these with a system containing an embedded processor, between 1 and 3 displays (any combination of graphics and alphanumeric displays), keyboard and an inkjet printer (the first one on the market.) This was built around an 8086 CPU card. I was responsible for the majority of the software design and implementation on this system which then performed all of the front end processing for this mini's. The project was very time critical in that the hardware had to be installed and running before the satellite Giotto was launched. This in turn was time critical in that it had to intercept Halley's comet.

Hardware

Intel motherboards (pre-PC)

Matrox graphics cards

Software

RSX 86

PL/M 86

I was employed by Logitek as the Technical Support Manager with responsibility for the south of England. Logitek were at that time the sole Altos distributor for the UK. When I started there, all of the machines in the range were running CP/M & MP/M, but whilst I was still employed there we started selling Xenix & Unix machines from Altos. At the time the only software available was Uniplex and Informix. Both of which we sold and supported.

Beam Business Systems (a subsidiary of Unilever) had 13 offices around the country selling a range of machines. I had responsibility for providing second line support to all of the offices on the Altos range which they sold.

I worked for two years as a programmer for Unichem, a pharmaceutical wholesalers. I was working on a micro based project for pharmacies to keep track of patient records, warn of possible drug interactions etc.