Darrell Cadwallader

1431 39^th Avenue N., Saint Petersburg, FL 33703-5615 

unix@cadwallader.cc • 813-600-8767 • darrell.cadwallader@gmail.com

UNIX Infrastructure Engineering – Administrator/Supervisor/Manager

Ambitious, versatile and dedicated IT management professional with a strong background in system administration, security administration, technical writing, Internet content development, and technical support. Proven ability to evaluate, design, and implement effective training programs, appraise client / project requirements, accurately assess issues, and develop innovative solutions to resolve and accomplish all goals and objectives on-time and within budget. Skilled project leader; able to direct multiple tasks effectively and master innovative leading edge software and hardware tools.

Core Competencies:

•       Systems Administration •       Migrations/Consolidations •       Performance Tuning •       TCP/IP Administration •       RHEL, SuSE, OEL, CentOS

•       IT System Restructuring •       Test Development & Execution •       Enterprise Backup Solutions •       Legacy Application Updates •       Fedora, AIX, Sun, SCO, Tru64

•       OS Risk Mitigation •       Access Control •       Intrusion Detection / Security •       Team Building & Leadership •       VMware Virtualization

 

UNIX Systems Engineer – Cutting Edge Recruiting Solutions                                                          2015-2016

 

Contract systems engineer for One Blood, fka/Florida Blood Services. Primary goal to maintain the current medical/billing system running on Caldera Linux 8.0.0, UNISYS Mapper 8R1.E6 on unsupported HP DL380G2 servers – no one currently on staff has the knowledge necessary to administer it. While assigned to this project it was determined that a physical-to-virtual migration of the OS and application would be necessary for BCP purposes. Using VMWare vCenter 4.1.0 and RHEL 7.2, the most recent version of Mapper (12R2) was installed, the database was purged from the physical environment and ported to the new platform. Rudimentary instructions were provided to staff tasked with maintaining database lookups.

 

UNIX Systems Administrator – Apex Systems, Inc.                                                                        2014-2014

 

Contract systems administrator for Catalina Marketing Corporation. Originally tasked for UNIX vulnerability risk mitigation - including patching for the Heartbleed bug and the Bash Code Injection Vulnerability - the role grew to server builds and deploy virtual machines. Part of a team of five, responsible for administering ~700 physical and virtual machines, primarily SuSE SLES 9.4-10.3 and AIX 7.1. Monitored the Dell SecureWorks portal for PHP and HTTP vulnerability probes to externally facing servers, added sensors to PRTG Network Monitoring tool.

 

Senior UNIX Systems Administrator – HCL America                                                                     2013-2014

 

Resumption of  role managing the transition to the new managed services provider for Adecco NA in a consultant position with HCL America. Primary focus has been managing a TRU64 TruServer cluster running PeopleSoft Financials and maintaining the company’s Redhat/Oracle Enterprise Linux environment. Worked hand in hand with offshore AIX administrators managing ~60 p570/p770 clusters, and assist in managing the storage environment, build/rebuild print queues to support 200+ printers world wide..

 

Senior UNIX Systems Administrator – Enterprise Integration                                                         2012-2013

 

Sole UNIX administrator supporting ~60 AIX, CentOS, Redhat and Oracle Enterprise Linux and legacy Tru64 servers of company’s primary account as a managed service provider.  Hired specifically in an SME capacity to ease transition of client account to an offshore MSP. Manage and administer AIX 5.3L TL12/Oracle RAC 11G R2 Clusters and storage devices (NetApp v3170 Filer, Compaq HSG80, Hitachi NSC55, AMS500, AMS1000, HP EVA/MSA, HP/Brocade switches). Hardware and OS support for SOA/BPEL, PeopleSoft servers. Document standard operating procedures, participate in the Change Advisory Board. Provide Windows system administration as required.

 

Key Achievement: 

§ Within three weeks on the team, a compromised SFTP/SCP server used for distributing malware, MP3 and MP4 files was discovered. Logging information and Google searches showed that the server had been penetrated as early as 2007. The environment was rebuilt in a virtual machine with CentOS. A ‘chroot jail’ to lock down access was employed, and all unnecessary daemons were disabled running on the server. 12 character passwords for all 70 accounts with 180-day expiration dates were implemented. A request with the networking/firewall team to block access from all known Chinese- and Russian-based IP addresses was submitted.

 

UNIX Systems Administrator (LAMP) – First Advantage Corporation                                              2009-2011

 

Assigned as an Infrastructure Support UNIX Administrator for the Advanced Biometrics Group of First Advantage, direct report to CTO. With a loose design specification and no legacy documentation, the Fingerprinting and I-9 classification platform was migrated from five physical servers (FreeBSD) to a virtual server environment (VMware) with nine servers running CentOS 5.5 OS. This was a time-sensitive data center migration from Savvis in Los Angeles to CoreLogic’s Poway data center.

Key Achievements: 

§ The entire ABG platform from the preparation/planning phase to “go-live” was completed in under four months. This included hardware specification, procurement, installation on-site, and gradual migration of approximately 1.7T of a MySQL database, web and mail (Postfix) server, client integration and four “store-and-forward” servers used by federal law enforcement agencies (FBI, FDLE), banking institutions (Bank Of America, Wells Fargo), and Florida state school systems and Dioceses.

§ Once the environment was moved into production there was an immediate 40% increase in the amount of fingerprint processing daily from the previous platform.

§ A Disaster Recovery site in FADV’s Indiana data center was built and was operational using similar hardware in less than three weeks.

Projects:

§ A second data center migration from CoreLogic’s data center to Tampa-based Peak10. The hardware is in place at this time. VPN connectivity to the FBI’s processing center is currently a bottleneck for the completion of this project.

§ Testing fail-over of the DR site from production is in planning phases.

§ Producing documentation of platform construction, processes and “lessons learned” information.

§ Migrate development/QA and staging environments from physical to virtual servers using current production platform.

 

ePortal / UNIX Production Support Supervisor – Sage Software Healthcare Division

Manager – Infrastructure Engineering – WebMD / Emdeon Practice Services Tampa, FL2004 – 2009

Held responsibility as WebMD/Emdeon’s IT Manager for planning and executing the migration of legacy hardware, operating systems, and application support. Assumed additional management responsibility after merger with Sage Software, managing the day-to-day activities of four senior UNIX and two contract WebSphere administrators. Coordinate and lead multiple concurrent projects as primary point of contact, responsible for analyzing project specifications, hiring administrative support / development staff, allocating tasks, leading meetings, and devising solutions. Maintain open communication with department heads, project managers, and senior level administrators.

Key Achievements: 

§ Successfully developed strong team through effectively performing all management duties such as hiring personnel, training and staff development, setting priorities, and resolving conflicting issues.

§ Spearheaded development and growth of ePortal (WebSphere 5.1) operations from eight users to over 135 physician practices in first twelve months of operation. Environment consisted of two application servers, two web servers, a single database (DB2) server and NDM and standby database (internal), two external DMZ web servers with failover and load balancing via f5s.

§ Hand-picked by senior management to lead server consolidation project team, streamlining over 400 UNIX servers in 6 WebMD datacenters to a single, staging facility in preparation for final destination to QTS in Suwanee, GA. Evaluated each server as datacenters closed and were shipped to make a determination to upgrade hardware, virtualize to VMWare ESX / ESXi servers (SCO/RHEL), prep for consolidation or EOL (end-of-life).

§ Credited for saving $72K a year in operational costs by migrating and consolidating over 300 POTS lines nationally into a single solution with a DR disaster recovery plan.

§ Managed over 275 UNIX servers and supporting multiple operating systems (AIX, RHEL, Fedora Core, SCO UNIX, Sun Solaris). Provided pre- and post-development support for a separate remote R&D facility.

§ Built Rivermine Telecom billing application with an Oracle 10g database on a virtual machine using Red Hat Linux ES4 (JDK 1.5, Tomcat 5.5, Apache Ant 1.6.5, Oracle 10g JDBC driver, Apache HTTP Server 2.0.54).

§ Siebel application migration from Sun SunFire boxes to pSeries servers of Emdeon’s corporate site in Nashville, TN to QTS in Suwanee, GA. The new environment consists of a Siebel production server (p570), Softtrax database (p560), Oracle external DMZ (p510), Oracle test (p52a), Kronos/Cognos (p55a), Oracle applications (p560) running AIX 5.1L. All servers are maintained via an AIX Hardware Management Console (HMC) at QTS from Sage’s Tampa offices.

§ Managed designated SLA’s, maintaining a 99.9% uptime for all UNIX Production support (SCO UNIX, RHEL, AIX) systems. Assist DBA team in Progress RDBMS migration from SCO UNIX to AIX/DB2.

§ Improved operational efficiency by serving as front-line liaison regarding new and future UNIX development projects, defined project scope and requirements to meet objectives.

§ VMWare virtualization of  SCO UNIX, RHEL 3, 4, 5 and Fedora Core Linux servers running Medical Manager and legacy support applications.

§ Provided detailed documentation, standards and policies in a SharePoint Portal, creating new processes to build strong UNIX operation teams.

§ Proactively structured departments new hiring / evaluation / training procedures and to direct all phases of project development, qualification, and quality assurance testing.

UNIX Systems Administrator

PSCU Financial Services, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL2001 – 2003

Adaptec, Inc.,/Distributed Processing Technology, Inc., Maitland, FL1998 – 2001

Orchestrated and deployed key technical security operational processes and procedures to protect PSCU credit unions online financial information and banking products. Researched third party hardware and software products, purchasing over $5M in Sun equipment including; 37 Sun Netra t105, AC200, and SunFire v100 / v120 servers. Held accountability for capacity planning and performance tuning of mid-range and enterprise level systems to support Oracle (PSCUFS) / Progress (Adaptec/DPT) databases, Siebel, Lawson and SAS CRM/HR applications. Provide secondary support to Progress DBA on SCO UNIX. Provided key technical leadership in supporting all online operations.

Key Achievements:

§ Championed launch for eliminating most of the day-to-day administrative tasks, by automating various applications through development of a number of UNIX scripts.

§ Successfully coordinated the atomization of a secure file transfer process migrating transactional logs from middleware boxes to a protected server.

§ Drove project to configure and install Redhat Linux 7.0 on two Compaq Proliant servers as backup FTP and DNS servers, and construct Sun E450 with internal RAID-5 for Oracle production database for BRP site in Phoenix for PSCU Financial Services.

§ Credited for planning, evaluating and recommending purchase of Novell Borderware firewall to reduce distributed denial-of-service attacks on Adaptec’s primary web servers and FTP sites.

§ Evaluated, recommended and specified the purchase of two Sun Ultra 420R compute servers to support ASIC design group. Configured standard RAID-5 ASIC hardware production environment.

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Additional experience gained as Director of Operations for Orlando Business Internet Service.

 

Course work completed towards Bachelors Degree in Computer Science & Journalism

 

Valencia College, Orlando, Florida (2.91 GPA)

 

ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management (EXIN License 0033251) ~ Project Management Professional PMP ~ Business Management: Stress Management ~ Leadership: Creating and Communicating Vision ~ The Leadership Challenge: Enable Others to Act ~ Attracting Key Talent ~ Fire Up and Motivate Your Employees ~ Interviewing for Organizational Fit, Interviewing for Success ~ Managing Performance ~ Recruiting Top Talent ~ Working Wounded: Becoming a New Manager ~ Project Management Professional PMP: Project Management Framework and Project Initiation, Core and Facilitating Project Planning Processes ~ SharePoint 2003: SharePoint Basics Standard Libraries and Lists, Advanced SharePoint Features, Site Administration Basics,  Advanced Administration Functions ~ Lawson E-Human Resources 8.1.1 ~ Solaris System Administration I & II ~ Solaris TCP/IP Network Administration ~ Solaris Systems Performance Management ~ Sun Systems Fault Analysis ~ Shell Programming ~ Employee Sexual Harassment Awareness ~ Getting Past Clashes: Valuing Team Diversity ~ Workplace Diversity Awareness ~   Recognizing Safety Procedures, Effective Communication, and Professional Behavior ~ Workplace Harassment for Employees ~ Workplace Violence