David Lee: The day job
My career has been in IT closely associated with science research:
nearly thirty years at Durham University,
over eight years at
ECMWF
(European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) in Berkshire
and most recently at the UK national synchrotron,
Diamond Light Source
in Oxfordshire.
Durham: As Systems Programmer then UNIX/Linux Team Leader, externally-facing results of my work included:
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Enabling us to be one of the first UK universities to connect to the then new-to-the-UK Internet, as part of the JNT Shoestring project and among the first to run and link with the DNS and NTP.
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Involvement in the SSMP "Fawn Book" definition and example implementations.
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Adding several new features to the open source Samba package.
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Writing the portability framework for the high-availability Linux-HA/Heartbeat/Pacemaker resilience project.
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The usual run of enhancements, bug reports, fixes and fix-validations to other open source software such as sendmail, dovecot and MailScanner, and to proprietary software such as Sun's Solaris OS.
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Helping set up and support the MantlePlumes website that facilitates lively debate about different likely geophysical models of mantle convection within the earth.
ECMWF: Our supercomputers are consistently high in the world's Top 500 list, and run by our section, with our team supporting its massive data requirements. My work included:
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Enhancing the ECFS filesystem interface onto the multi-petabyte (approaching exabyte during 2023) data archive, including a complete rewrite of its client (Perl)[1] and a major restructure of its server (C++). This included porting the various server components to Linux, introducing and consolidating a build system under GNU Autotools and introducing git version control.
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Overseeing the transition and scale-up of the Data Handling System servers from an old set of about 15 inherited labour-intensive AIX servers to around 200 automatically provisioned and configuration-managed Linux servers.
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Various resulting contributions to the CFEngine configuration management library.
Diamond:
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Developing and managing the automated OS deployment and configuration management framework across our thousands of varied Linux servers and desktop computers.
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Open-source contributions to CFEngine, CFE's policy-channel framework and Red Hat kickstart.
