Skills

Skills and Areas of Work

We have been using and studying systems of the Unix family for twenty years, first among them Sun Solaris, but also NetBSD, Mac OS/X, and Linux. From the beginning, we have integrated commercial software with Free and Open Source Software, combining the strengths of commercial support with the rich features, fast development cycles, flexibility, extension possibilities, and security of free software.

The emphasis of our work has been on automation of system installation, patch management, software packaging and deployment, and configuration.

Specific Solaris Skills:

System installation: JumpStart, DHCP, Flash Archives, Live Upgrade, GRUB
Remote administration: several LOM variants, system controllers of all Sun servers
SunRay (Thin Client)
Ressource Management
System V packages and patch methods
System analysis (DTrace, Modular Debugger, kstat)
Sun and Veritas Volume Manager
Service Management Facility, especially integration of existing services
ZFS, especially in combination with zones

Aside from installation and configuration, systems programming has regularly been our task. We prefer the Perl programming language, which we know in depth. Here is a list of the languages that we have used:

Systems and application programming: Perl, C
Shell and script languages: sh/ksh, csh/tcsh, Tcl/Tk, Expect, Python
Others: Assembler, Lisp, APL, J

Networking:

TCP/IP, Ethernet, FibreChannel
Name Services: DNS, NIS, NIS+, LDAP
Systems Management: DHCP, SNMP
IP-based services: LPD, SMTP (Sendmail, Postfix), FTP, NNTP, NTP
WWW/intranet: HTTP, HTTPS, AJAX, content management, database interfaces (SQL)
Client/Server programming (RPC with C and Perl)
Security: ipfilter, GnuPG, authentication and encryption via TLS/SSL (certificates)

Wir installed, configured, and administered instances of the following database systems:

PostgreSQL
Sybase ASE
BerkeleyDB
Sqlite
MySQL

We have applied the following source code management systems:

SCCS
RCS
CVS
Continuus
Subversion
Mercurial

For production of documentation and reports, we strongly recommend tools based on open standards. Convertibility and automation depend on them. We have found the following techniques and tools worth considering:

TeX, LaTeX
PDF, PostScript
HTML, CSS, XHTML, XML, XSLT, SVG
OpenOffice Document Format, DocBook, POD