Ben Copeland
My goal is to continue building my career in Dev/Ops and Service management. I have a wealth of real-world experience in automation, administration, root cause analysis and remediation. My experience in the production-level Enterprise and customer-facing services has proven to be of great value to customers and subsequently the company's bottom line.
Twenty years in hosted enterprise software, SAAS, and the "Cloud"
Excellent communication skills
Excellent written skills
Hosted Applications Management and Dev Ops using Puppet or Fabric API
Strong experience with virtualization including KVM, Vmware
Linux (Red Hat/CentOS based mainly and some Debian)
Solaris system administration
Strong familiarity with the *nix command line and the many tools available within a given distribution
Strong advocate for open source platforms
Security tightening for hosted applications.
Experience with Bugzilla and Bugzilla-based ticketing systems
Windows experience as an office tool and base machine
Services application configuration and management knowledge includes SendMail/Centrion, Apache, SSH, NIS, LDAP, DNS (BIND/named), cvs, svn, git, yum
Experience with managing J2EE applications in production designed to meet RosettaNet (RNIF), EDI, SOAP, etc. standards & protocol requirements.
Experience RAID configuration with some knowledge of when to use what
Experience with Dell hardware management (mainly PowerEdge servers) using DRAC 4/5/6
Experience Linux and Solaris software RAID systems
SQL database with a focus on the open source database MySQL
Cisco PIX firewall, Catalyst series switches, general IOS knowledge
Juniper/F5 load balancer “bigpipe” commands and usage.
Excellent ability and huge interest to learn new technologies and methods
CentOS 4/5/6 System Administration
Hosted Services Delivery
Manage over 300 unique enterprise customer deployments
Manage 100's of nodes running both bare metal CentOS as well as VMware ESXi 4.x as a base platform hosting multiple Linux VM's in production managed through Vsphere.
Management of Dell hardware with daily use of DRAC to boot, configure and image new hosts
Part of a larger on call rotation including support for all hosted offerings
Work managed using Atlassian Jira (tickets) and Confluence (wiki)
Production monitoring with Nagios
Develop and maintain monitoring scripts to be used as Nagios plugins.
Documentation of Hosted Services including on call run books, work flow and overall process.
Automation of backend processes including ongoing support and enhancements to modular automation processes developed in my previous position
Work closely with tools and core operations teams to utilize API's and create simple yet powerful tools that extract real-time information of production machines.
Further enhancements and updates to support process
Work with svn/rpm/yum/puppet for platform management
Designed, developed and documented modular automation processes and scripts for new cluster deployments still used in production to this day.
Worked closely with the early operations team and legacy engineering as well as support at Proofpoint to help launch a series of new hosted products
Helped develop a boot-strapping system using golden images created by System Imager coupled with yum repository management and puppet management of devices and files.
Developed the core support process around an enterprise hosted solution including escalation, core run books and other documentation.
Worked with customer support to create and launch the new customer on-boarding process using MediaWiki and later Confluence.
Lead senior tech support engineer for some of Proofpoint's largest and most problematic customer deployments
Point of escalation for issues that need immediate attention and need direct support from sustaining engineering
Enterprise software and hardware support for PPS software and appliance customers
Engage sustaining engineering when issue is not resolvable by operational means
Worked with team to develop and launch of our internal KnowledgeBase
Open and document bugs via Bugzilla
Deliver and deploy software updates on production systems
Research and draft Root Cause Analysis documents to be delivered to the customer by upper management
Document customer issues within proprietary call tracking system
Document tech notes and run books for use by other support staff
Periodic operations reviews with customers
Engage with sales engineers and associates to find best possible solution and upsell opportunities
Technical Account Manager for our fortune 500 customers
Release Engineering/Operational Readiness/Applications Management
Global Support and management of software as a service in a heterogeneous Unix/Linux environment
Create and deliver customer workshop documents and ensure E2open meets its contractual SLAs
Create and deliver internal process documents for use by our Global NOC Staff
Performance metrics reporting to meet SLA requirements
Monthly and Quarterly operations reviews with customers
Work directly with dev and QA to solve and document production incidents
Root cause analysis
Provide guidance during high-severity and fatal production issues
Work with the team to define requirements for, build, test and maintain an HA production knowledgebase
Work directly with customers to identify and solve high-level production issues (Unix)
Work directly with executive management to create processes and build 24/7 global support for software as a service
Write bash and perl scripts for recovery, monitoring, reporting and to optimize response times to high severity and fatal issues
Solaris 9 and Linux RH AS 2.x system administration
Web service administration
Unix Systems Administration
Compile and/or install software where needed in a mixed environments of Solaris, Linux , HP/UX, SGI and Win32
SendMail Configuration
NetBSD systems administration
NIS, NFS
General corporate IT
Veritas Backup Exec support
Amanda Backup software support
Firewall administration
Automated indexing of multiple terabytes of data on RedHat Linux 6.2 (Linux kernel 2.2.x) systems using bash and Perl utilizing Digital Integrity's proprietary software
Managed the “Findsame” application in production which was capable of indexing large blocks of text for matches and side-by-side comparison.
Maintained and Operated Cisco PIX firewalls, and Cisco Catalyst switches to define various levels of security for a multi-tiered environment
In charge of DHCP configuration for corporate and DataCenter
Managed installation of OS and product for deployment to production
Installed and maintained Bugzilla (bug tracking tool)
Configured Linux 2.2.x and 2.4.x kernel for optimal performance
Maintained print services
Web Server (Apache HTTPs) Administration
Sendmail (SMTP TLS) Administration
Change control, tagging, branching using CVS
The main networking and Linux admin and the point man for > 100 servers in production
Managed various applications and services such as CVS, LDAP, SSHd, BIND, Apache, Mod_SSL, Samba, NFS, SendMail and Mon (Perl-based monitoring tool) on Linux 2.2.x and Linux 2.4.x systems in the production data center and corporate environments
Unix Sys Admin and Network Operations for a team of developers
DHCP configuration for all environments.
Installed and maintained Bugzilla (bug tracking tool)
Qmail/SendMail (SMTP) Administration
Managed change control, tagging and branching using CVS
Managed OS and applications in development, QA and production environments
Built and installed Sun E250's, configured RAID 5 with Solaris Disk Suite
Established relationships with vendors to purchase Sun, Cisco and Linux boxes
Established relationship with hosting facility
Installed and Configured various services such as m SMTP, NIS, SSH, BIND (dns), Apache(http/s), Samba, LPD, Novell, NFS, Veritas on Solaris 8 and Linux systems
Managed the technical support staff
Worked directly with customers and senior staff to solve production issues
Management of service applications
Configuration of SendMail (SMTP), Apache, Cisco routers for frame relay and DSL, Livingston Portmasters, Radius, FTPd and BIND
Maintained company website
Automated using Perl and shell scripts to improve customer service
As their first employee, provided technical support for subscribers of WombatNet