Thomas Leavitt

Senior Unix Systems Administrator (SAGE Level 3/4)

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Short Biography

In August of 1999, I co-founded another start-up, now called TargetFirst, Inc. We raised $6 million through two rounds of funding in 2000. I served as Senior Systems Operations manager, designing the back end infrastructure and helping to maintain it. Unfortunately, the company's business model ("get paid to surf the web") depended on Internet banner advertising, the value of which was about 1% of what it was at the time we started the business by 2001. As a result, the business model became non-functional, and after a brief attempt to re-purpose our assets and re-work the business model, the company was put into hibernation mode so that the founders could move on to the next big thing. This experience taught me a lot (perhaps even more than my first, successful business), and left me much older and wiser than when I started.

In July of 2001, I married Gunilla (see picture above), and after taking some time off, and various experiments, on March 16th, 2004, we incorporated our web design and hosting business as Godmoma's Forge, LLC. Gunilla started designing web sites in 1994 (when I started hosting them), and we'd been pursuing business in this area, in a less focused fashion, for quite a while (as my resume indicates), so it seemed logical to formalize things (incorporation, business license, fictitious business name statement, EIN, etc.). In addition to my primary role as an IT Services consultant (systems and networking) for a variety of companies in Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz, I handle the business end of things, manage our in-house web hosting environment, and do custom implementations of open source applications for our clients. Our offices are currently located at 916 Soquel Ave., #B, in sunny Santa Cruz, CA. We offer high quality, low cost web and graphic design. Give us a call, and see what we can do for you.

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Cover Letter

In my role as Linux/Unix Systems Administrator and Sybase DBA, I have dealt with every phase of systems management and integration, from specification, to negotiating purchases, to builds and installs, configuration, and ongoing maintenance and upgrades. I've managed large scale/high transaction rate email, DNS/Bind, http/s and Sybase RDBMS systems running on Solaris, HPUX, Linux, and FreeBSD, configured networks, and implemented detailed reporting and monitoring systems in Perl and SQL. All this for a 24/7/365 web hosting (WebCom) and consumer online service (ClickDough) where a single outage meant thousands of dollars in lost revenue and customer good will.

I've spent plenty of sleepless nights on the phone with vendor technical support, tracking down and resolving network issues, software bugs, hardware failures and security issues. One of my most memorable experiences was escalating a technical support call all the way to Sun's operating systems engineers (in the face of massive resistance). It was the second or third time I'd been paged, only to discover that all I/O to a particular filesystem was hung (thus requiring an unclean shutdown/reboot). This is a particularly nasty problem when you've got gigabytes and gigabytes of data for "fsck" to run through when the system comes up (a process that could take hours) and it is handling web service for 10,000 customers who are paying you quite a bit of money to make sure their sites are available 24/7/365. Sun eventually wound up issuing me a special pre-development only patch to fix a problem in the UFS filesystem code (they called it a "UFS hole"). This was prior to the availability of journaling filesystems, which I immediately implemented (vxfs) as soon as they became available (on top of a logical volume management system, to enable easy migrations across physical storage devices).

At WebCom (among other projects requiring thousands of lines of code), I wrote a series of daily, weekly and monthly reports (using Perl and SQL queries against our Sybase database) that analyzed and highlighted important business and systems metrics. This allowed management to feel the pulse of business operations on a daily basis and quickly identify any changing trends. These reports also served to highlight any anomalous situations - in one instance, I noticed that a significant number of "active" customers had not had a payment credited to their account in several months; a few SQL queries served to confirm that a database programmer had failed to re-initialize a trigger after modifying and reloading a table. I corrected the situation and prevented a much larger issue from developing.

As Systems Administrator for WebCom, I executed several wholesale migrations from one architecture to another as we grew, moving from HPUX on an PA-RISC 9000/835 with internal hard drives, to Solaris on a Sun Sparc 1000E with a Sun SparcStorage Array running Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) with software based RAID, and from there to an Enterprise 4001 and an RSM Storage Array running Veritas Volume Manager that utilized the Veritas File System for greater speed and uptime (bye bye "fsck", hello journaling filesystems with hash-based indexes). I also moved our database from SQL Server on NT4, to Sybase on HPUX 9, and then to Solaris 2.6 on a Sun S1000E - all with near zero downtime; on top of that, I executed several in place upgrades of our Sybase RDBMS server (Sybase 10.x was a bug-ridden disaster requiring constant babysitting).

As Senior Systems Operations manager for TargetFirst, I designed and oversaw the construction of a robust and highly scalable system architecture, and then transferred the core elements to a low cost/low maintenance architecture (at 10% of the previous cost), as the company downscaled and put itself in hibernation while pursuing legal redress against a vendor who defrauded it.

On top of all this, I was the primary source of support for the internal LAN/PC Networks of both companies, diagnosing hardware, software and networking issues. If there was something technical that needed to be dealt with - network, phone, wiring, PCs, office equipment, I dealt with it. This is also a common scope of responsibility when I act as a consultant.

If you're looking for someone who can tackle almost any technological project with aplomb, is comfortable being given only the most general direction to come up with a solution, and is capable of handling the entire process, from defining the problem, to specifying a solution, to identifying the product(s) and negotiating with the vendor(s), to working out the financing, to unpacking, installing, and configuring the equipment and software, I'm your man.

Thank you for your time and attention, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
Thomas Leavitt

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Resume