About Us
Vertical Sysadmin Inc started out as a general system administration firm and now specializes in training and implementation consulting on Automating System Administration with CFEngine 3.
Leadership
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Aleksey Tsalolikhin, CEO Aleksey has been a UNIX/Linux system administrator for 13 years. Wrangling EarthLink's server farms by hand during growth from 1,000 to 5,000,000 users, he developed an abiding interest in improving the lot of system administrators through configuration management, documentation, and personal efficiency training. Aleksey is a member of: |
Code of Ethics
All Vertical Sysadmin staff and subcontractors subscribe to System Administrators' Code of Ethics.
In the Press
TheBitSource.com: Aleksey Tsalolikhin teaching Cfengine 3 class at SCALE 2011.
"Intro to Automating System Administration with Cfengine 3" in Linux-Mag.com
"The State of Open Source System Automation" in Linux-Mag.com
"Configuration Management Summit" in USENIX ;login: magazine
Completed Projects
- A security audit of a startup's web site prior to launch, and explain-as-we-go training on security. Audit uncovered a potential vulnerability that was fixed prior to product launch.
- A client called with a SCO OpenServer box that was unusable: disk filled up with logs and unable to login into single-user mode due to serial console filled up with error messages. Unable to boot off recovery floppies either. Diagnosed bad media on recovery floppies, recreated them, and client was able to mount the hard drive and clear out the logs and continue using the system.
- An apartment rental website was down as the Linux server it was hosted on would not boot. Turned out it was hosted on a disk array that took longer to initialize then the server was willing to wait for it. Increased timeout and server started booting fine.
- Reviewed another consultant's work on consolidating and cleaning customer & sales data (for a retail company) to create a CRM system. Recommended a more efficient way of handling the data consolidation. Wrote PERL scripts to assist with loading data from Excel and CSV files into MySQL database.
- Helped recover a web site down due to malicious activity. Restored data from backup and locked down the server. Helped customer create next-gen version of this web service (updated the OS; tightened security; helped integrate the Zope-based Web app with the new OS and the newer version of Zope).
- Wrote a custom shell script for a movie company to help find and copy files based on date and filename pattern match (a mash-up of "find" and "cp").
- Helped nail down product requirements for a product catalog system for a company selling industrial lighting.
- And many more.
