Eric Eisenhart

Current

• Lead Unix/Linux Systems Administrator at Sonoma State University

Past

• Founder & President at SoCoSA
• Co-Founder at NBLUG
• Contract Programmer / Consultant (Self-employed)

• Internet Services Specialist at Santa Rosa Junior College
• Senior Programmer at Envisix Corporation
• Outside Contract Programmer at Songline Studios (now O'Reilly Network) via Keyplus (Self-employed)
• Programmer/Systems Administrator at Sonic.net Inc.
• Programmer/System Administrator at Sonoma.Net
• Student Network Technician at Santa Rosa Junior College
• Computer Technician at Law Offices of Fluss and Skelton

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7 more...

Education

• Santa Rosa Junior College
• Analy High School

Recommended

4 people have recommended Eric

Connections

88 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

• My Website

Eric Eisenhart’s Summary

I solve problems and I quickly learn how to solve them in completely new environments.

At one job I jumped in feet first and helped design an assembly-line because that's what the project needed. I don't expect to ever be involved in another physical assembly-line, but I definitely expect to be involved in unusual new things that I've never dealt with before.

Goals? Keeping challenged and doing new interesting things. Working to give back to my field.

I'm currently working as a System Administrator, but I wouldn't mind getting back into programming again.

Central to all my recent projects at work: "Infrastructure 2.0". Automating provisioning and as much of systems management as is practical/possible. Mostly with puppet.

Eric Eisenhart’s Specialties:

Linux/Unix administration, Puppet, Perl, SQL, programming.

Eric Eisenhart’s Experience

• Lead Unix/Linux Systems Administrator

  Sonoma State University

  (Educational Institution; 1001-5000 employees; Higher Education industry)

  October 2003 — Present (4 years 11 months)

  Lead Unix Sysadmin. Linux (RHEL), Solaris.
  
  Went from managing less than 30 servers to over 80 from 2003 to 2007. Also went from 3 *nix admins to 1.5 (lost one junior admin position that wasn't replaced; lost most of the *nix admin work from a senior person as he got dragged more into storage/NAS/SAN/backups). Kept everything going smoothly, primarily by moving more and more to standardized installations and automated system management.
  
  Deployed puppet; trained co-workers, presented to colleagues at other CSUs, learned enough Ruby to write some simple data-collection (facter) plugins.

• Founder & President

  SoCoSA

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2006 — June 2008 (2 years 6 months)

  Started the group, first recruiting a small core group of volunteers, and then running meetings open to the public.
  
  Speaker recruitment, generally running anything I can't get another volunteer to do.
  
  Gave one presentation on Puppet to the group.

• Co-Founder

  NBLUG

  (Non-Profit; Computer Software industry)

  1998 — 2006 (8 years)

  Helped found North Bay Linux Users Group in 1998. Was vice-president for years, then President, then a board member, then board secretary. As president I started down the path of reorganizing the group into a more formal structure with a board elected by the members of the group.
  
  Gave presentations to the group a number of times, on topics such as Networking on Linux, PostScript programming, distribution comparisons. Ran the InstallFests for a few years.
  
  I started being substantially less involved in 2006 when I started concentrating effort on starting up a group for local sysadmins. I continue to help out here and there, but I no longer have a formal role with the group.
  
  NBLUG continues to be successful, with meeting attendance of at least 35 people for every meeting, an active mailing list, and a thriving community.

• Contract Programmer / Consultant

  Self-employed

  (Self-Employed; Myself Only; Information Technology and Services industry)

  1995 — 2005 (10 years)

  Various small projects for different people/companies. Perl, SQL, etc... Still available for something interesting that comes up, but haven't done much lately.

• Internet Services Specialist

  Santa Rosa Junior College

  (Educational Institution; 1001-5000 employees; Higher Education industry)

  January 2002 — September 2003 (1 year 9 months)

  Unix Sysadmin, Webmaster, Exchange Admin.
  
  CVS administration, Sendmail admin, SpamAssassin, Apache HTTP, BIND DNS, MySQL DB, Amanda backups.
  
  Primary author of Technical Web Guidelines for campus, worked with interested parties throughout campus community on many of the details.
  
  Liaised with Academic Computing department during politically sensitive transition of a number of services to a server run by my department.

• Senior Programmer

  Envisix Corporation

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  December 1999 — February 2001 (1 year 3 months)

  Previously known as IX Labs. Primary work was programming in Perl for the DatingFaces.com website. Substantial Oracle query optimization work as well.
  
  Designed and implemented a system for creating and shipping individually customized "dating" cards; Perl to interface with rest of site; physical assembly line design; barcode tracking. Learned enough PostScript to handle the minimal customized portions of the printouts.

• Outside Contract Programmer

  Songline Studios (now O'Reilly Network) via Keyplus (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  February 1999 — December 1999 (11 months)

  Primarily worked for a single client, most of which was part of a content management system used by Songline Studios (company later merged back into O'Reilly and became "The O'Reilly Network") and other customers. Worked out of office space in O'Reilly's Sebastopol offices part of the time.

• Programmer/Systems Administrator

  Sonic.net Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  November 1997 — January 1999 (1 year 3 months)

  Wrote and maintained a Perl, SQL and C code. Sysadmin work. Some networking stuff (Cisco and Lucent Portmaster equipment).

• Programmer/System Administrator

  Sonoma.Net

  (Partnership; 1-10 employees; Online Media industry)

  August 1995 — October 1997 (2 years 3 months)

  Primary System Administrator. Kept several Linux servers, an NT4 server and a Solaris server running. Built websites.

• Student Network Technician

  Santa Rosa Junior College

  (Educational Institution; 1001-5000 employees; Higher Education industry)

  April 1995 — August 1995 (5 months)

  Manned a helpdesk. Assisted with system administration for several linux servers. Wrote simple Perl. Wrote a little C (modified login to capture passwords and feed them into Kerberos).

• Computer Technician

  Law Offices of Fluss and Skelton

  (Partnership; 11-50 employees; Law Practice industry)

  September 1993 — August 1995 (2 years)

  Programmed for dBase IV database. Administered NetWare network and DOS workstations.

Eric Eisenhart’s Education

• Santa Rosa Junior College

  Associate, Computer Science, 1992 — 2002

• Analy High School

  1987 — 1992

Additional Information

Eric Eisenhart’s Websites:

• My Website

Eric Eisenhart’s Interests:

infrastructure 2.0, interesting problems, new technology, doing more with less, science fiction, bicycle riding, whisky/whiskey, food, wine

Eric Eisenhart’s Groups:

NBLUG, SoCoSA

•    The League of Professional System Administrators
•    USENIX Association
•    SAGE: The USENIX SIG for Sysadmins
•    Sonoma State University
•    Sonoma County System Administrators
•    Puppet Users

Eric Eisenhart’s Honors:

Sonoma State University Applause Awards - January 2006, October 2007

Eric Eisenhart’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch