PHIL KAUFFMAN

Professional profile

I have been working in the field for a bit over a year now and have had the opportunity to work with some of the brightest people I have ever met. My current boss, coworker and former coworker have taught me most of what I know today about Linux and systems administration. I have developed a love for automation and scripting. (Not sure what I would do without a proper shell.) I am always eager to learn. I believe I am ready to move on, learn more and in the near future, run my own team. I graduated from the University of Iowa, where I received a B.A. in Informatics and German. Informatics is a combination degree of Computer Science along with my cognate in art / graphic design. My passion has always been working with and learning from computers. When I bought my first computer there wasn't anyone I knew to brainstorm with or help me with any problems I may have had. Therefore, it was up to me to figure out what to do in any situation; it was at times like that when I turned to Google for answers. Before long, I became great at searching for solutions. My excitement for computers and technology grew even more from modding my xbox. I installed a chip to install a new dashboard to run unsigned code. During that specific project, I learned about basic networking, soldering, and FTP. Still today I enjoy working with these same technologies on my home network. I have a eight core running Proxmox, where I can install several virtual machines. Running a samba, ssh, lamp, ftp has been par for the course for a while. Sometimes I enjoy putting on my grey hat and break wireless encryption (WEP,WPA) on one of my routers.

Work experience

Augt 2011 - Present University of Chicago, Dept. of Computer Science Full-Time

Intermediate Systems Administrator

I work for the Department of Computer Science doing everything from basic desktop support, Linux lab maintenance, infrastructure creation and maintenance and various custom projects introduced by faculty and graduate students. The following are two projects that I most recently worked on.

I coordinated between a CS research group and Cleversafe to get 11 nodes delivered to our machine room. Before their arrival, I needed to order and learn how to configure a Cisco switch. I worked with one the networking engineers from ITS to make this happen and learned to set up a basic configuration of a Cisco switch.

The virtualization project is one of the most rewarding projects I am currently working on because of the use and or investigation of high availability tools such as drdb and pnfs. Above all my goal is to keep the entire setup as simple as possible since we do not have the budget for any fancy load balancers or similar products. Syncing two filers is my main objective, and I believe to be able to accomplish this by using LVM/dd/rsync. The scripts and documentation from the project can be found here.

Sept 2009 - May 2011 University of Iowa Business Services, Part-Time

Desktop Support Technician

My duties included much more responsibility than simply administrative tasks for all the users and computers that we managed in our area. I participated in many formal and informal departmental group discussions with several of my ideas being implemented or added to our work such as, a new organization system for deploying computers and a script to fix Windows WMI. I had an integral role in both of our team models of sustain, support and development. I took further initiative and increased my knowledge base learning C# from a team member.

One of my main objectives while working for Business Services was to, migrate the departments Printing/Mail, Accounts Payable and Purchasing from Windows XP to Windows 7, which I was able to complete with the help of two other student employees.

Jan 2007 - Present AJAX F.C. Chicago

Web Developer & Designer

When I took this job, I was hired to build AJAX F.C. Chicago a new website. Still being in high school and relatively inexperienced, I remade the website in HTML only. My job after the initial creating of it was to then maintain and update the site whenever necessary. Two years into college I did not have the time necessary in order to maintain the site that I had during high school, so I moved the site to Squarespace and created the new design. I am currently redoing the site in PHP in order to save the club money and by doing so the manager will have more custom tools to administer players, posts, events etc.

Summer 2009 Oertzen Gmbh

Intern

This internship took place in Hamburg, Germany at Oertzen Gmbh. I mainly built industrial sized pressure washers. I also worked with metal, as a mechanic fixing broken pressure washers, as well as as in the wharehouse organizing replacement parts. I also had the opportunity to work along side IT staff. I maintained VPNs and other servers, installed new printers and other business equipment.

Summer 2008 Federal Reserve Bank Chicago

Intern

My duty was to create a support document for their server based banking system. Part of my daily responsibilities included setting up regular meetings with people to learn as much as I could about their system.

Technical Skill

Education

2007 - 2011

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA - IOWA CITY, IA

I recently graduated from the University of Iowa with a 3.0. GPA. Throughout my four years at that school, I gained a lot of programming experience from taking a variety of computer science courses that were offered. One course which centered on C++ was one of the most beneficial classes I took during my time at the university. I learned how to think like a programmer, and I learned new ways to view and solve problems. The class was intense, and because of it, it is now very easy for me to pick up new programming languages. As any programmer can tell you, once you know one language another language can easily be picked up because the only real differences are syntax and object orientation.

The second most beneficial course I took in college was the final project course for the Informatics degree. We were put into small development teams and given requirements to build a web application for an organization in the Iowa City area that needed to keep track of donations they collected for music programs at local high schools. It was a great learning experience. I had never previously worked with PHP so I had to learn the language quickly, which thanks to the C++ course, turned out to be fairly simple. While working with my group using Fossil, a version control system, I learned a great deal of what it is like to be part of a programming team, specifically how to best utilize each other’s strengths. As the project leader, I had each member focus on what they knew and tried to teach the individual, who did not have much programming experience, some programming along the way. This method was very effective in that it kept everyone working on the project and learning new things at the same time.