Linux System Administrator
photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for a part-time Linux System
Administrator. If you like the site and the community, this is an
opportunity to help out and get paid.
We maintain a cluster of about 14 Linux machines plus a load balancer. Most of the systems are currently running Fedora Core 4 or RedHat Enterprise Advanced Server 2.1 (the Oracle 9i machine). We hope to upgrade/replace all of machines within the next few months to more modern versions of Linux. We'll probably do this by purchasing one or two new physical computers, setting them up, transferring services to the new boxes, then wiping the old boxes. We have a couple of 2 TB Infrant NAS devices that we recently purchased to make this job easier.
We have an agreement with a local sysadmin company to do the basic stuff of keeping patches up to date and monitoring for health and intrusions. If you are not local to the Boston area, these guys can also be the ones who go to the colocation cage when something physical needs to be adjusted. If you are on vacation, these guys can provide coverage for any procedures that you've documented.
What might some tasks be for the coming months? Upgrade to AOLserver 4.5 (compile some C code). Figure out a way to patch the firewall so that a particular IP address, e.g., a robot, can't tie up the server with 10 requests per second. Come up with a strategy for archiving server logs on a new NAS box (probably from Infrant). Come up with a disaster recovery strategy involving pushing data periodically to Amazon S3 and rented servers. Come up with a monitoring strategy so that slow or stuck server processes get restarted and so that denial of service attacks are repulsed. Replace CVS with Subversion.
We anticipate that this job should require 10-20 hours per week.
Please email a cover letter stating salary requirements and your resume (in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is acceptable, Microsoft Word we can't read reliably) to philg@mit.edu, with a subject line of "photo.net system administrator".
About the Company
photo.net was established in 1993. We have minimal (approximately
$500,000/year), but fairly steady and growing, revenue. Currently all
contributors work from home, but if service improvements result in
revenue growth, we expect to be renting some office space in the
Boston area by early 2007.
Advantages of working for photo.net:
- your work will be used; if you build it, they will come. Well, at least 1000 or so folks will probably try out any new service within one day. Big companies can afford to pay people to build things that never get marketed. photo.net is small and we don't mind experimenting with new ideas and services.
- your work will be public; instead of asking an employer to look at your resume and imagine how glorious the system that you built was, the employer can visit www.photo.net 24/7 and see for him or herself
- you can learn from some senior people, many of whom were pioneers on the Internet; we have a strong culture of design and code review
- if you're in Boston, you can hang out with our circle of friends, many of whom have started and sold businesses and most of whom are successful enough to own and operate private aircraft (free helicopter rides for anyone working at photo.net!)
