Awesome. Now that you have finally come to the...

ropes end, you have finally given me the full story.

You have never coherently explained things, just intimated the issues. You've never came out and said *WHAT* it is you really wanted, just side-swiped it and told us to look at the impression it left on the side of it. You finally gave me the meat of your argument, rather than complain about it without fully backing it.

Now that you've finally done this... now we (at least *I*) can start answering your questions. This is an full explanation of what I do and what I am and some advice at the end... please don't just skip it and go to the end.

First off. I'll tell you what I have, what I use and what I do.

I have about 60 machines (from real hardware to virtualized machines). These machines are *ALL* Linux, either RedHat v5.2 though RedHat v7.3, a couple of Fedora Core Machines, and CentOS v3.x through CentOS v4.x through CentOS v5.x.

For various reasons the older machines have become static machines devoted to specific tasks but updated as needed to appease the PCI gods. The still maintained distributions are kept up to date in an ad-hoc manner due to PCI (Payment Card Industry) and least amounts of downtime requirements.

We basically have 5 type of machines:

Type 1) Firewalls: we technically have 7 of them. Two Firewalls in hi-availability mode also doing gated load balancing as part of the hi-availability role, one VPN server which operates only Site to Site, network to network connections. Two firewalls that operate as routers with access rules and exceptions and two web applications firewalls using squid, apache and mod_security.

Type 2) Database machines: We have 10 of these (one with two mysql instances), 3 pair with master-master, row-level circular transactional replication. 2 slaves (one for reports and one for backups) off one of the main master-master, and one slave (to the same other machine for backups) from another master. 1 standalone machine for stats logging related to webservers.

Type 3) Dedicated Webservers: We have quite a few of these. We have a modperl instance backing a reverse proxy plus webserver (port 81 for the modperl, port 80 for the proxy). These setup vhosts are served by 2 triple clusters, they all run from a shared "runtime environment" and all run the same apache configs (multi configs per vhost for all the machines and only the affected addresses work for each machine). These webservers also use the same DB machines (one set as master the other slave, the newer ones use either as failover write or read only) and use DB caching which speeds up the large setup like we have. These machines are access through the Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) which also load balance them. The WAFs are them selves load balanced through the gated firewalls using least busy connections selection. This works relatively well and can be very robust.

Type 4) Application Servers: These are the meat of the system. This is where our Software product shines. We use a heavy mixed of C, Perl and Shell. These application servers host our API daemons, SOAP servers (both CGI and persistent Perl), Restful Services, Reporting frontends, SSH terminal access to our "legacy" terminal application and also allows access to our new "GUI" pointy clicky client which is a cross platform Windows, Linux, OSX application written in Perl and wxWidgets. (More on this in a moment)

Type 5) Miscellaneous Servers: These range from super old single use single task machines (ie 500MHz 256MB ram... automagically throttles throughput to an acceptable level) for bulk sending of e-mails. To very fast and powerful machines, that some are used for Reporting, for monitoring (with nearly full instrumentation for the deployment process, but not yet for QA, Development or testing processes) or for things like Centralized logging and LDAP, DNS, TIME (NTP), log analysis, machine IDS logging, or for Virtual Machine hosting duties.

A word on our "GUI Client" for our software. It is written in Perl and uses wxWidgets. It runs on Windows (now using Active State Perl vs Strawberry Perl). It runs on OSX using Perl. It runs on Linux using Perl. Its fast, communicates very gracefully over bad connections, vs SSH which is *very* connection oriented and very susceptible to disconnect.

Now, a word on Staff requirements, which also apply to me:

Windows (XP, Vista, 7) is only a testing environment, preferred method of the machine == VM. It cannot be used as a Primary Workstation, it will not be paid for if its in the cost of the monthly reimbursement and you are not using either OSX or Linux or *BSD. As a VM OS you can buy a full edition.

Staff preferred OS == OSX. Acceptable OS == Linux or BSDs. Private/Public Key Authentication is the only method to get into our Login relay machines for Staff, a PCI requirement.

I administrate, deploy and maintain the deployment and stability of these machines. These machines also are my charge, I have to make them work right. I have to setup the services properly (from Firewalls, to DB machines to Reporting machines etc...). I grasp all the backend parts and how things work together and am able to recover from catastrophic problems relatively quickly... but actually explain our software stack... ummm no.

Now a word on your real question, which is *WHAT* can I put on my Resume to "guarantee" a phone call from a recruiter or HR type persons?

Answer: Nothing, Everything. The real question is, making sure your resume/CV represents you and your aims and wishes... not what you will settle for.

My "recruiter" resume... well was kinda jammed into one page. If you want to look at it, I don't care if you do look at it. Its kinda plain and very stark in my opinion and really SUCKS.

It got me exactly BUPKISS, no interviews or face to face, a couple of recruiter calls giving advice to compress it even more:
http://www.gregfolke...olkert-resume.pdf

Now, the one I traditionally have is full and very detailed and stylized (but not comprehensive). This helped. A lot in fact. I don't care what Recruiters tell you, they are only looking for easy picks and obviously you ain't one (not a BAD thing about you, but it is a BAD thing for you as == no job). I'm not one either and I got passed over for MANY "Enterprise" Linux jobs through recruiters as they assume nobody good is in Grand Rapids, MI and all have to come from Detroit or from New York or Raleigh North Carolina (etc).

This is the resume that got more interviews than *ANY* recruiters combined ever got me. Its located here:

http://www.gregfolke...FolkertResume.pdf

I've not updated it since 2007. But since its in Open Office and not in Word... I export to PDF just to piss off the recruiters, its the one thing they don't quite get.

All this to say: You have to make sure you do what *YOU* need to do. I stopped listening to so called Hiring recruiters as they have one thing to do... fill a position as quickly and as cheaply as possible for the customers so the recruiter can get the biggest bonus for coming in under the stated maximum. They don't care about you... only themselves. You have to start cold calling places, even if they don't like it... it lets them know you really would like to work and are making your it your job to get a job. That is a big plus no matter what the recruiters tell you.

I hope you get what I am trying to tell you and have been the whole time... change what you are doing to make yourself more desirable. Stop making excuses and just do it.

I had to change, a divorce was in the making, I had to change to the extreme.

Good luck and do it.

Post #326,969 by folkert 5/27/10 8:07:36 PM Reply	Awesome. Now that you have finally come to the... ropes end, you have finally given me the full story. You have never coherently explained things, just intimated the issues. You've never came out and said WHAT it is you really wanted, just side-swiped it and told us to look at the impression it left on the side of it. You finally gave me the meat of your argument, rather than complain about it without fully backing it. Now that you've finally done this... now we (at least I) can start answering your questions. This is an full explanation of what I do and what I am and some advice at the end... please don't just skip it and go to the end. First off. I'll tell you what I have, what I use and what I do. I have about 60 machines (from real hardware to virtualized machines). These machines are ALL Linux, either RedHat v5.2 though RedHat v7.3, a couple of Fedora Core Machines, and CentOS v3.x through CentOS v4.x through CentOS v5.x. For various reasons the older machines have become static machines devoted to specific tasks but updated as needed to appease the PCI gods. The still maintained distributions are kept up to date in an ad-hoc manner due to PCI (Payment Card Industry) and least amounts of downtime requirements. We basically have 5 type of machines: Type 1) Firewalls: we technically have 7 of them. Two Firewalls in hi-availability mode also doing gated load balancing as part of the hi-availability role, one VPN server which operates only Site to Site, network to network connections. Two firewalls that operate as routers with access rules and exceptions and two web applications firewalls using squid, apache and mod_security. Type 2) Database machines: We have 10 of these (one with two mysql instances), 3 pair with master-master, row-level circular transactional replication. 2 slaves (one for reports and one for backups) off one of the main master-master, and one slave (to the same other machine for backups) from another master. 1 standalone machine for stats logging related to webservers. Type 3) Dedicated Webservers: We have quite a few of these. We have a modperl instance backing a reverse proxy plus webserver (port 81 for the modperl, port 80 for the proxy). These setup vhosts are served by 2 triple clusters, they all run from a shared "runtime environment" and all run the same apache configs (multi configs per vhost for all the machines and only the affected addresses work for each machine). These webservers also use the same DB machines (one set as master the other slave, the newer ones use either as failover write or read only) and use DB caching which speeds up the large setup like we have. These machines are access through the Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) which also load balance them. The WAFs are them selves load balanced through the gated firewalls using least busy connections selection. This works relatively well and can be very robust. Type 4) Application Servers: These are the meat of the system. This is where our Software product shines. We use a heavy mixed of C, Perl and Shell. These application servers host our API daemons, SOAP servers (both CGI and persistent Perl), Restful Services, Reporting frontends, SSH terminal access to our "legacy" terminal application and also allows access to our new "GUI" pointy clicky client which is a cross platform Windows, Linux, OSX application written in Perl and wxWidgets. (More on this in a moment) Type 5) Miscellaneous Servers: These range from super old single use single task machines (ie 500MHz 256MB ram... automagically throttles throughput to an acceptable level) for bulk sending of e-mails. To very fast and powerful machines, that some are used for Reporting, for monitoring (with nearly full instrumentation for the deployment process, but not yet for QA, Development or testing processes) or for things like Centralized logging and LDAP, DNS, TIME (NTP), log analysis, machine IDS logging, or for Virtual Machine hosting duties. A word on our "GUI Client" for our software. It is written in Perl and uses wxWidgets. It runs on Windows (now using Active State Perl vs Strawberry Perl). It runs on OSX using Perl. It runs on Linux using Perl. Its fast, communicates very gracefully over bad connections, vs SSH which is very connection oriented and very susceptible to disconnect. Now, a word on Staff requirements, which also apply to me: Windows (XP, Vista, 7) is only a testing environment, preferred method of the machine == VM. It cannot be used as a Primary Workstation, it will not be paid for if its in the cost of the monthly reimbursement and you are not using either OSX or Linux or BSD. As a VM OS you can buy a full edition. Staff preferred OS == OSX. Acceptable OS == Linux or BSDs. Private/Public Key Authentication is the only method to get into our Login relay machines for Staff, a PCI requirement. I administrate, deploy and maintain the deployment and stability of these machines. These machines also are my charge, I have to make them work right. I have to setup the services properly (from Firewalls, to DB machines to Reporting machines etc...). I grasp all the backend parts and how things work together and am able to recover from catastrophic problems relatively quickly... but actually explain our software stack... ummm no. Now a word on your real question, which is WHAT* can I put on my Resume to "guarantee" a phone call from a recruiter or HR type persons? Answer: Nothing, Everything. The real question is, making sure your resume/CV represents you and your aims and wishes... not what you will settle for. My "recruiter" resume... well was kinda jammed into one page. If you want to look at it, I don't care if you do look at it. Its kinda plain and very stark in my opinion and really SUCKS. It got me exactly BUPKISS, no interviews or face to face, a couple of recruiter calls giving advice to compress it even more: http://www.gregfolke...olkert-resume.pdf Now, the one I traditionally have is full and very detailed and stylized (but not comprehensive). This helped. A lot in fact. I don't care what Recruiters tell you, they are only looking for easy picks and obviously you ain't one (not a BAD thing about you, but it is a BAD thing for you as == no job). I'm not one either and I got passed over for MANY "Enterprise" Linux jobs through recruiters as they assume nobody good is in Grand Rapids, MI and all have to come from Detroit or from New York or Raleigh North Carolina (etc). This is the resume that got more interviews than ANY recruiters combined ever got me. Its located here: http://www.gregfolke...FolkertResume.pdf I've not updated it since 2007. But since its in Open Office and not in Word... I export to PDF just to piss off the recruiters, its the one thing they don't quite get. All this to say: You have to make sure you do what YOU need to do. I stopped listening to so called Hiring recruiters as they have one thing to do... fill a position as quickly and as cheaply as possible for the customers so the recruiter can get the biggest bonus for coming in under the stated maximum. They don't care about you... only themselves. You have to start cold calling places, even if they don't like it... it lets them know you really would like to work and are making your it your job to get a job. That is a big plus no matter what the recruiters tell you. I hope you get what I am trying to tell you and have been the whole time... change what you are doing to make yourself more desirable. Stop making excuses and just do it. I had to change, a divorce was in the making, I had to change to the extreme. Good luck and do it.
Post #331,456 by crazy 8/17/10 1:33:34 PM Reply	Hey Greg (just saw this thread) Love your 2nd resume'. Really. I only got your "official" one years back. But, one word scares me. "Promoting" open source. I know in the 2nd one you demoted it to "promoting". But really. Can't you find a word that signals your endorsement of open source while not making it seem that you will ignore perfectly valid non-open source solutions? Or be prejudiced against them somehow? It's a no win word. The word will be a disqualifier for some people, and won't get you that many brownie points with the people you care about. You already got max brownies based on tech skills with them.
Post #331,460 by folkert 8/17/10 2:43:34 PM Reply	Well, its true... I DO prefer OSS stuff over equally as good Proprietary systems. Key word there - equally. At least equal in places where it matters to the application of said product/system. I guess you are right... promoting would be better said as: Favoring where applicable So, you are right.

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