Almost 2 years later... a follow up

It was around June 2007 that I started working with the idea of having my own IT consulting firm, the first seeds were planted and now after almost 2 years the flowers have started to grow and take form.

When looking at my previous post on "thursday, june 7, 2007" I drift back in time a bit. Realizing that in those lost two years I have learned so much that is now so valuable in the current economic and technical climate.

Let me give you a small overview of what has changed in the two years.

June 2007, around this time I was working as Senior UNIX Administrator for a managed services company. My main job was dealing with some very high end HP-UX servers for some main clients and also with a load of smaller Linux servers. I did the job mainly from home even though we had an office in City West Business Park this was due to the large number of clients I had under me which were crossed around the globe. Most of my work was thus done in American time zones. The main skills I feel I learned were advanced UNIX networking, administration and maintenance, VoIP implementation using Asterisk, in-depth system administration knowledge and also Project management and Independent working.

December 2007, after working for almost 2 years in the managed services business I decided to swap to a job as VoIP integrator and Linux Security System Administrator for a newly formed company that focuses on the Internet Video Markets. It was on location in the East Point Business park and it was a good switch in working 24/7 as a managed services engineer to a 9 to 5 job (Well almost). I implemented a VoIP network using Asterisk which spanned eventually 8 offices worldwide in to 1 virtual PBX setup. The main skills I picked up in this position were: Advanced VoIP configuration and maintenance using Asterisk, Linux Security systems (SNORT, IPTABLES, KEEPALIVED and many more) and documentation of projects. For more info about what I did with the VOIP why not look at the case study!

November 2008, Having completed a reliable, robust and unique asterisk VoIP network and designing a extreme secure network I got called for a offer as Technical Architect for a consultant company. The project was based on Windows 2000 servers that needed to be migrated to windows 2003 servers and the applications running on it needed to be reverse engineered in to a new XML Based application which would be cross compatible for newer servers. I needed to audit the network initially which gave me an indication that a lot more things could be improved. Now I am still working for this consulting company but as a service provider.

From now on I will try to keep you updated more