Resume | Philip Kauffman

Profile

I am a Linux Systems Administrator (Intermediate to Senior) that designs and builds infrastructure, does root cause analysis, and builds systems to customer specifications. I have extensive experience using configuration management utilities, such as Puppet and Ansible, to automate the installation and configuration of servers. Having dealt with an inordinate amount of software in the educational environment, I have become adept at troubleshooting and diagnosing all types of hardware and software. My areas of interest are in virtualization, clustered network filesystems, and infrastructure design.

Skills

Intermediate (I) | Advanced (A) | Expert (E) | Guru (G)
  • Bash (E)
  • Python (A)
  • Windows (I)
  • Mac OS X (E)
  • Debian (E)
  • Ubuntu (E)
  • CentOS (A)
  • FreeBSD (I)
  • MySQL (A-E)
  • Postgresql (A)
  • Virtualization (E)
  • Ansible (A-E)
  • Puppet (A-E)
  • Foreman (A-E)
  • Apache (A)
  • Nginx (A)
  • Git (A)
  • Cisco IOS (I)
  • IPtables, PF (A)
  • Rsnapshot (E)

Professional Experience

University of Chicago | Aug. 2011 - Present

Systems Engineer

A fast paced environment where solutions to problems are expected immediately. Each action is done with the intention of making the faculty members job easier so they may focus on teaching the material or their research.

Daily Tasks:
  • Build and maintain servers for faculty, PhD students and infrastructure.
  • Maintain, support 200+ Linux and 30+ Mac workstations.
  • Interact with students, faculty and admins to solve problems and offer advice.
  • Author scripts to automate tasks.
  • Perform backups, troubleshoot problems, and implement software upgrades.
  • Plan and implement software/hardware upgrades and migrations.
  • Assist with supervision of student workers.
  • Provide TA like assistance to students.
Accomplishments:
  • Promoted from Systems Administrator II to III after 2 years.
  • Spearheaded departmental implementation of server virtualization.
  • Migrated NFS home directories (~4k accounts, 10s of millions of files) from NetApp filer to a custom build server.
  • Migrated various Drupal sites, including www.cs.uchicago.edu, to a new web server under CS control.
  • Built and managed MPI cluster using Puppet for the Economics department.
  • Built SLURM job submission cluster for faculty and student use: http://howto.cs.uchicago.edu/techstaff:slurm
  • Created an Ansible playbook that sets up computers for the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC).
  • Created an Ansible playbook that configures all the Macs that we manage.
  • Wrote python API for the Gluster file system: http://github.com/papamoose/python-gluster-cli-api

University of Iowa | Sept. 2009 - May 2011

Desktop Support Technician (Part Time)

A part time job while I was getting my bachelors degree. Primarily a support role for 12 departments on campus. I had enough time and flexibility to bring value in building some infrastructure that saved workstation deployment times.

Daily Tasks:
  • Man help desk phone and email.
  • Deploy software updates via SCCM.
  • Setup, maintain, and support the desktops for 12 departments on campus.
  • Interact with staff to solve specific software issues.
Accomplishments:
  • Migrated Accounts Payable from Windows XP to Windows 7.
  • Started to learn C# from a team member to help build an internal tool.
  • Lead training new student employees.
  • Setup a Linux PXE server to automatically to deploy Windows 7.

Education

University of Iowa
  • Graduated May 2011
  • B.A. Informatics
  • B.A. German

Hobbies

  • Traveling
  • Motorcycles
  • Beer tasting (philipkauffman.com/beer)
  • Ask me about my home lab.