Brad Knowles

Current

Sr. Unix System Administrator at University of Texas at Austin
Member at League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA)
Postmaster & Listmaster at Python.org

Postmaster & Listmaster at NTP Public Services Project
Member at The System Administrators Guild (SAGE)

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Past

Sr. Consultant at Snow BV
Sr. Systems Architect at Belgacom Skynet SA/NV
Sr. Process Consultant at Collective Technologies

Sr. Internet Mail Systems Administrator at America Online
Analyst/Terminal Operator, Computer Scientist at Defense Information Systems Agency

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2 more...

Education

University of Oklahoma

Recommended

14 people have recommended Brad

Connections

390 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

Brad Knowles’s Summary

Unix/Internet systems administration generalist with twenty years of experience. Deep specialist skills in areas relating to mission-critical applications and systems infrastructure, including scalability and performance tuning thereof.

I've gotten where I am because I love a good challenge, and there are always things that needed to be done and I was around to do them. However, sometimes the best challenges aren't the biggest systems, but instead scaling smaller systems to handle previously unknown loads, or coming up with unique and interesting ways to try to solve old problems.

Brad Knowles’s Specialties:

Large-scale/highly available mission-critical/infrastructure systems, especially Internet e-mail, mailing lists, Domain Name System (DNS), Network Time Protocol (NTP), anonymous ftp/mirror servers, USENET news, and related subsystems.

Brad Knowles’s Experience

Sr. Unix System Administrator

University of Texas at Austin

(Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

January 2008 — Present (1 year 7 months)

Projects:
---------
* Led effort to acquire dozens of machines for various projects within the directorate with a total value of ~$200k, including negotiations with vendors and VARs to get the best price.

* Led effort to evaluate alternative storage technologies for an enhanced backup service starting at ~60TiB. Included negotiations with VAR. Resulted in a further ~50% discount off the previous "best offer" from that vendor.

* Sole System Administrator for the uTexas Enterprise Directory (TED) system, which is the Enterprise Directory service for UT, with about ~4m objects and an average of ~80 records per object, in one of the world's largest deployments of OpenLDAP.

* Sole System Administrator for the uTexas Identity Management (TIM) system, which is the in-house developed application to perform identity management for the current ~50,000 students and ~20,000 faculty and staff, as well as alumni, former faculty and staff, and any of the other ~4m EIDs in the system.

* Sole System Administrator for the uTexas Authentication Management (TAM) system, currently under development. The goal is to provide a next-generation enterprise-wide web authentication system for anyone with an EID. All logons to all central and other EID-enabled web services across the entire campus will use this system.

* Former member of the Postmaster Team, managing a fleet of Ironport E-mail Security Appliances, rejecting ~95% of all incoming traffic as spam based on reputation, and another ~2-3% based on content, with virtually no false positives, and millions of "ham" messages passing through the system per day.

* Sole Engineer responsible for initial R&D of the log processing system for the directorate, using Splunk and starting with over 100GiB/day of logs, and ~20-30TiB of logs over the past six months. This is the first phase of the project, which may grow into a University-wide service that will likely process TiB/day of logs, and storage nearing a Petabyte.
Member

League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA)

(Non-Profit; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

November 2005 — Present (3 years 9 months)

Professional Association (organization size refers to number of employees, not number of members):

* Founding Member and Platinum Individual Sponsor

* Consulting with Web 2.1 company that will change how the world sees Web 2.0 "walled garden" social networking sites

* Consulting with a leading company providing innovative sales and marketing solutions for public-facing businesses and organizations wishing to provide free wireless access for their customers

* Consulting with one of the fastest-growing publishers of self-help and transformational books, CDs, DVDs, card decks, and live audio webcasts

* Consulting with a leading international vendor of scalable and integrated open source e-mail, groupware, and collaboration products

* Expert witness on legal case involving UK Intellectual Property law regarding patents on Internet e-mail

Speaking engagements:

* Guru-is-in speaker for LISA 2007 conference in Dallas, TX
Postmaster & Listmaster

Python.org

(Non-Profit; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

June 2003 — Present (6 years 2 months)

Primary active member of the Postmaster & Listmaster teams for python.org (organization size refers to the number of system administrators involved in helping to support the python.org machines, not the number of people in the Python Software Foundation, the number of people programming in Python, the number of unique e-mail addresses in the various mailing lists, etc...).

Responsible for doing system and mail administration for python.org, including adding mailing lists, debugging mailing list problems, debugging general mail problems, maintaining and developing the Internet mail system and the anti-spam features, and most anything else related to Internet e-mail and mailing lists for python.org.

* Recipient of the 2008 PSF Community Service Award (see http://www.python.org/community/awards/psf-awards/ ).
Postmaster & Listmaster

NTP Public Services Project

(Non-Profit; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

May 2003 — Present (6 years 3 months)

The NTP Public Services Project (www.ntp.org) supports the Reference Implementation of the NTP protocol, and provides a wide variety of community support services, including mailing lists, newsgroup gateways, access to facilities for creating community supported documentation, etc....

The size listed above is representative for the behind-the-scenes administrators and core developers who do the bulk of the work supporting the site and the project.

I maintain the mail and mailing list servers, and am the primary contact for all issues regarding those subjects.

I've also learned a lot about NTP over the years, and I try to contribute what knowledge I can to the community supported documentation, helping to develop tutorials on NTP, etc....

* Guru-is-in speaker on NTP for LISA 2007 conference in Dallas, TX
Member

The System Administrators Guild (SAGE)

(Non-Profit; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

September 1995 — Present (13 years 11 months)

Professional Organization, Special Interest Group of USENIX (organization size refers to employees, not membership)

Invited Talks/Tutorials Given (see <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/>):

* SANE'98: "Sendmail Performance Tuning for Large Systems"

* LISA 2000: "Design and Implementation of Highly Scalable Electronic Mail Systems"

* LISA 2002 and RIPE 44: "Domain Name Server Comparison: BIND 8 vs. BIND 9 vs. djbdns vs. ???"

* SANE 2002: "Introduction to DNS"

* BSDCon Europe 2002 and UKUUG Winter Conference 2003: "MTA Performance Comparison: sendmail, postfix & exim on *BSD"

* NLUUG 2005 "E-mail and Beyond" conference: "Scalable IMAP Services: Theory, Practice, and Non-technical Issues"

Also:

* On Program Committee for SANE 2000 and 2002

* Co-author of SAGE Booklet "Internet Postmaster: Duties & Responsibilities", USENIX Association 2006, ISBN 1-931971-49-8, URL: <http://www.sage.org/pubs/15_postmaster/15_postmaster.html>
Sr. Consultant

Snow BV

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

April 2002 — March 2003 (1 year)

Leading Dutch Unix/Internet Consulting Company

* Specialized in consulting and training related to the DNS and Internet e-mail

* Brought in strategic partnerships with companies such as Sendmail, Nominum, and Men & Mice

* Consulted for "a worldwide leader in advanced technology systems for the semiconductor industry", providing technical leadership on a consolidated Enterprise e-mail system project for 3000-7000 employees world-wide

* Invited Talk presented at LISA 2002 and RIPE 44: "Domain Name Server Comparison: BIND 8 vs. BIND 9 vs. djbdns vs. ???"

* Invited Talk presented at BSDCon Europe 2002 and UKUUG Winter Conference 2003: "MTA Performance Comparison: sendmail, postfix & exim on *BSD"

* Three articles published on wireless network security: "Is Your Wireless Connection Secure?", "More on AirPort/IEEE 802.11b Security", and "802.11b WEP Security Update..."

Operating Systems Used: Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS X
Sr. Systems Architect

Belgacom Skynet SA/NV

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)

November 1998 — February 2001 (2 years 4 months)

Premier Belgian Internet Access/Services Provider

Responsible for architecture and design of all systems throughout the company, especially focusing on replacement systems that needed high scalability/availability.

* Provided technical leadership resulting in customer base growth of approximately 1000% and systems staff by at least 300%

* Systems architect for Mail & DNS, Newsmaster, TUCOWS/FTPmaster, Proxy cache administrator (FreeBSD, Solaris, Digital Unix/Tru64, Network Appliance, Linux)

* Program Committee member for SANE 2000 and SANE 2002

* Invited Talk presented at LISA 2000: "Design and Implementation of Highly Scalable Electronic Mail Systems"

Operating Systems Used: Solaris, FreeBSD, Digital Unix/Tru64, Linux, MacOS
Sr. Process Consultant

Collective Technologies

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

December 1997 — July 1998 (8 months)

Recognized Leader in Systems Management Services for Highly Complex Environments

General Unix systems administration consulting for a variety of customers, specialising in Internet e-mail systems, Domain Name System (DNS), and a variety of other infrastructure components requiring high scalability/availability.

* Strategic and tactical architecture consultation for very large ``freemail'' provider

* Integration and training services for large anti-virus vendor incorporating their product into Unix firewalls and Internet e-mail gateways/hosts

* Invited Talk presented at SANE'98: Sendmail Performance Tuning for Large Systems

Operating Systems Used: Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX, MacOS
Sr. Internet Mail Systems Administrator

America Online

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; TWX; Internet industry)

June 1995 — August 1997 (2 years 3 months)

Worlds Largest Provider of Internet and Proprietary Online Services

Responsible for architecture, design, implementation, monitoring, and management of the Internet gateway for worlds largest known e-mail system, including hardware/operating system/application software installation, configuration, monitoring, and management across a large group of servers responsible for various aspects of handling the e-mail gateway interface between AOL and the Internet.

* Provided technical leadership resulting in system growth of over 1500%

* Redesigned AOL DNS infrastructure to increase capacity by 10,000%

* Previewed and commented on second editions of "sendmail" by Bryan Costales and "DNS and BIND" by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu

Operating Systems Used: HP-UX, SGI Irix, DEC Unix, MacOS
Analyst/Terminal Operator, Computer Scientist

Defense Information Systems Agency

(Government Agency; 10,001 or more employees; Military industry)

September 1989 — June 1995 (5 years 10 months)

DOD IT Provider for the System Needs of the Services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Several different positions were held during this period of time. These include, but are not limited to, Analyst/Terminal Operator in support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff/Logistics Directorate (J4)/Logistics Readiness Center in the National Military Command Center within the Pentagon; Network and Systems manager for Office of the Secretary of Defense Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence directorate (OSD C3I); Network Engineer and Testbed Manager for DISAnet; Postmaster, Internet mail gateway administrator, and Domain Technical Point-of-contact for disa.mil; and consultant to DoD CERT in the creation of ASSIST.mil.

Operating Systems Used: SunOS 4, Solaris 2.1

Brad Knowles’s Education

University of Oklahoma

BSCS , Computer Science , June 1984 — August 1989

Also worked part-time at the Library of the University of Oklahoma to help pay for school.

Operating Systems Used: PDP 11/70 with BSD 2.9, Vax/VMS, Encore MultiMax (10 NS-32332 processors) with Mach kernel and BSD 4.x userland, MacOS

Additional Information

Brad Knowles’s Websites:

Brad Knowles’s Interests:

Doing interesting and unusual things with computers and wireless networking, playing with our three cats, travel to interesting/exotic places, amateur theater, and blacksmithing. Currently working on writing my own book, co-author of a USENIX/SAGE "Short Topics" booklet, and at least two or three other book or booklet ideas also under consideration.