Kenneth Whittaker

726 Pacheco Ave • Santa Cruz, CA 95065 • M:831-566-5128 • H:831-425-1714

kenw@emua.net

Technical Support Professional

SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS

·         Extensive experience in high profile technical support at the escalations level including some
system administration experience.

·         Able to handle difficult customer situations involving technical escalations.

·         Ability to help with simple user-level problems, or get into the source code.

SKILLS

·         Extensive knowledge of Network Appliance (netapp) file servers.

·         C, PERL, UNIX, Linux, Windows, DNS, Apache, Samba, Sendmail, Postfix, Tomcat

·         Scripting in Bourne, C-shell, BASH, AWK, SED.  Regular Expressions.

·         Network trace analysis with tcpdump, snoop, nettle, ethereal, network monitor.

RELEVANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

·         Discovered and wrote patches for a number of bugs in the Network Appliance file server
kernel.

·         Developed scripts for properly diagnosing intermittent (problems that appear at random,
then disappear before they can be properly diagnosed) issues on Network Appliance file servers.
The same concepts would also work on any UNIX server.

·         Became the “go-to” person for kernel and network performance issues.  Developed a good
understanding of network trace analysis, TCP/IP, protocols (NFS, DNS, NIS, TCP/UDP).

·         Developed web-based knowledge resources for the technical support staff at Network
Appliance.

·         Developed the “skulker”, a tool that scripted core (crash dump) analysis so that 90+ cores
were eventually solved per month automatically, and within minutes of upload completion.  
This led to customers with apparently bad crashes receiving fixes within hours.

·         Developed the “crash message database” which pulled crash messages out of solved core 
dumps and compared with customer crash messages.

·         Discovered a hard drive that corrupts data.  A Network Appliance file server was initially


blamed for the problem.  Isolating the drive was important because it directed responsibility


at the drive manufacturer, and restored customer confidence in Network Appliance.

·         Started a small ISP during college. Ourpeak.com maintains about 100 dial-up customers.

WORK HISTORY

9/2000-present         Independent Consultant, EMUA Network Support, Santa Cruz, CA

8/1996-9/2000          Escalations Engineer, Network Appliance, Sunnyvale, CA

3/1996-8/1996          UNIX Administrator, TRW Systems IG, Colorado Springs, CO

5/1995-1/1996          Installer, Infotec Development Inc., Colorado Springs, CO

EDUCATION

B.S., Physics, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO 1995