James is currently employed as a Network Administration Engineer, providing 3rd level engineering support on monitoring products within the web-hosting division of Cable and Wireless. In this varied and challenging role, he provides engineering support to staff and customers who have problems with the operation of the network or systems monitoring application. He has additional responsibility in shaping the direction of the systems monitoring application, in adding new functionality, and in managing the ?bug fix and enhancement? workload for the product. He also enjoys a mentorship role, helping the younger engineers to develop their diagnostic skills, and helping them improve their product knowledge.
James' primary technical focus is the operation, maintenance and troubleshooting of a network monitoring application based on Netcool, Openriver and BMC with customised add-ons written in Perl and PHP that runs across 3 sites within the UK.He holds the Sun Certified Network Administrator, and Sun Certified System Administrator Part 1 & 2 qualifications. He is a fluent programmer in C, C++, Perl, shell scripts and Visual Basic. He has good networking skills, understanding, and working fluently with the networking software under Solaris or Linux, such as NFS, NIS, snoop, ifconfig, ping, traceroute etc. He is comfortable with switches, routers and firewalls. To supplement his income, James works occasionally as a consultant for the Internet consultancy Netcraft Ltd, providing consultancy on connecting to the Internet and World Wide Web, and the integration of database backends with web pages.
He is the co-author of the book The Magic Garden Explained: The Internals of UNIX System V Release 4, published by Prentice Hall in May 1994.
James is educated to degree level, and received a Bachelor of Science degree, grade 2-1, in Computer Science from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1984.
The Magic Garden Explained: The Internals of UNIX® System V Release 4