Graham Nicholls

Personal details:

Personal Attributes:

I am clear thinking and excellent at problem solving - to which I bring strong analytical skills, and many years experience. My motto is "the answer's always 'yes', now what's the question?" - I am unfazed by any situation, and honestly believe that any IT problem can be solved. When training, or generally, I am enthusiastic and motivated - IT is a dynamic and challenging field, and I enjoy my work. Lastly, I am loyal and conscientious - if your system is down, I'll work till its fixed - all night if necessary.

Employment History:

• 1992-Present: Self employed consultant (T/A Rock Computer Consultancy)

  After leaving Primar, I took a couple of jobs, but couldn't settle. I missed the challenge and variety of working in a small computer bureau, where I was given much responsibility for the whole systems, as well as involvement in technical decisions at all levels. So when a few months later, a previous employer offered a contract to work for a couple of days a week, I jumped at the chance, and became self employed.

  I am a generalist, and can turn my hand to any field of computing. Recent projects for clients cover areas like: Server and process monitoring. Data translation from foreign formats. Creation of PDF documents from old (Uniplex) word processing formats. Network security auditing. Complete server installation. Backup and disaster recovery planning. Cloning Unix servers.

  Technology Skillsets - in no particular order: Unix Scripting (shell, ruby, python, perl) C Web technologies TCP/IP

  Typical of the sort of work in which I might be involved is a disk recovery for a client; a client called with a problem - a crashed disk. Initially, the disk was sent to a disk recovery bureau (Solomons), who offered a £4000 no fix/no fee recovery effort. After a day, Solomons were unable to recover the data, so the client asked me to have a look. Working in the evenings and at weekends, I was able to recover the important data files for my client, by attaching the disk to a linux system and using various tools which I wrote or had already writen, to examine the disk. The superblock had gone, and there didn't seem to be a backup copy, but by identifying other organisational areas, I was able to recover the data.

  Security is an area of interest and involvement for me. I install firewalls - my current preference is for SnapGear products, but I have experience with others. Using various open source tools such as nmap, ethereal, ettercap, tripwire, and nessus are important steps in establishing and maintaining the security of any site, and keeping up to date with the various security sites is vital in order to remain patched to the most current releases. Systems will occasionally be hacked, and I am familiar with both chkrootkit and rkhunter as tools for identifying rootkits, which I have had to recover systems from one more than one occasion.

  Recently a client has asked me to assist in migrating from several old WP formats to pdf. In order to achieve this, I have become conversant with pdf and several tools for creating and handling pdf. PDF is an excellent format to use for all sorts of applications, particularly web facing ones, and I can advise and assist in conversion efforts. I have written several tools to integrate pdf creation utilities with informix data to create on the fly documents, as well as converting complex rtf files to basic pdf templates.

  Training now forms a significant part of my work. I teach several courses for Learningtree; 336 Intro to Unix, the analagous, but Solaris based 442 course, 435 Unix Admin, 444 Linux troubleshooting and Optimisation, and 396 Unix tools and utilities. Course attendees grade the instructor and course after completion, and I consistently get excellent grades, and frequently rather nice comments, such as "God of Unix", which to be honest isn't really true, but is nonetheless very flattering. Heres a relevant cartoon.

  I have a good knowledge of hardware, and have frequently managed to recover complete disk datasets by replacing the drive electronics, with both SCSI and IDE drives. It seems surprising that the electronics seem to fail at least as often as the moving parts of a drive, but this approach is often effective. Of course, I would recommend a good backup strategy, with regular testing, rather than relying on someone clever enough to retrieve data from a crashed disk.

  
  
• 1989-1992: Primar Limited
  

  Primar (now Prism Data Management) was then a small but efficient computer bureau, specialising in direct marketing. I was responsible for the Unix systems and network, which I implemented from scratch, using TCP/IP over thin ethernet. The Unix systems, which I specified and installed and on occasions built, initially ran SCO Xenix, but later as hardware became more capable, I migrated them to SCO Unix version 3.2.0. (and upwards). I was the systems administrator and troubleshooter for all the Unix systems; responsible for backing up , adding users, etc. As I am a C programmer, I became particularly involved in the data-import/export side of the bureau business. This meant reading data from a variety of sources - mainframe tapes, DOS systems, Windows systems, other Unix systems, DEC Vaxen, etc. Typically, data would come in a variety of formats - plain text, BCD, comp3, EBCDIC, etc. I would often have to deduce the data format (as specs were rare!), and then write programs to convert it to CSV plaintext. I enjoy doing the Times crossword, and equally well enjoy the challenge of reading foreign data formats, and have generally been very successful, at least at data translation, if not always at the Times crossword.

  One project which I am rather proud of was a bit-mapped database. This project was inspired by the need to put large volumes of data onto a desktop PC, (at a time when 40Mb was the typical capacity of such a machine), and to be able to analyse the database very rapidly. A text file provides a definition of how to convert the source database into a bitmap. For instance, a value in the database might hold 'T' or 'F' for true or false. This simple flag can, of course be held in a single bit, so the text file would specify this. The bitmap creation utility would read this text file, and use its definitions to convert the database data to a much more compact bitmap form. The main part of the system is the engine, which analyses the bitmap according to the definintion, and a request file. Thus you can ask "How many people in (a range of postcodes) have bought from us before, spending over £50 and read the Guardian", and the engine will convert that from database form to bitmap form, and apply the query, very rapidly. Written in C++, the count system as it is called is very fast, and won an award for innovation.

• 1987-1989: Shortlands, Maidenhead.

  Shortlands produced accounts software. I did support. Thats pretty much it, really - just the usual stuff - installation of various flavours of unix. Some C programming. Site & phone support. To be honest its quite a while ago, now, and I can't remember much. Shortlands was a friendly place to work, but a failing business, so I jumped ship. This proved a wise move for several reasons, primarily though, because Shortlands disappeared soon afterwards. I'm sure that my leaving and their disappearance are unrelated.

• 1985-1987: Tetra Business Systems.

  Another accounts software company. Unix support/porting. Started out supporting the MS-DOS product/platform, including Novell. Worked on an XT with 10Mb of disk! (Luxury - why when I were a lad.....) Used to maintain that Unix was obscure and that vi was impossible. Times change (fortunately).

What Can I do For Your Company?


From simply installing and configuring Linux or Unix for your own projects, to complete programming scripting and web design, advising on security best practise, to performing audits, diagnosing network problems and bottlenecks to installing a network and intranet from scratch. I can implement a Linux mailserver to eliminate virus problems, and help to avoid being flooded by spam email. Linux makes an excellent file and print server with SAMBA, and I can install and maintain such a system for you. I can set up a web based network monitoring system, based on my own simple system called pymon (example here ), or based on the rather more complex Big Brother system. I am a great believer in KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) which was the motivation for writing my own monitoring software. If you have remote workers, I can set up VPNs for them to access your office network securely and reliably. Do you capture address data? If so I can offer you my PAF lookup facility based on GBInfo's excellent libraries, which allows for rapid and accurate address data entry. What about data migration - I can extract data from most systems, whether proprietary or not, and format it in the manner most suited to your new environment. If you want to host your own web site, then I can install and configure Apache with the appropriate modules for your site. I can assist in the design and implementation of your site, and can even host it for you. Nearly twenty years working in the IT industry (and 5 years as a hobbyist before that) have given me a breadth and depth of knowledge which is rare, as well a certain savoir faire which is seldom defeated by problems. The answer's always "Yes". Now, what was the question?

I am available for consultancy work - see contact details above. I believe my rates are very reasonable for someone of my experience and ability.