937 E Benton Avenue  |  Naperville, IL  60540 630-820-5704  |  frank@tuxrocks.com www.tuxrocks.com

Franklin E. Sorenson

 

 

 

 

 

IT Engineering  |  Systems Administration & Architecture  |  Process Improvement

 

Solutions-oriented Linux Systems Engineer in the financial services industry. Over 22 years’ in-depth Linux system experience as user, administrator, and engineer. Generates reductions in cost, time, and risk while enabling new capabilities in support of organizational goals. Tenacious in resolving estate-wide and system issues and delivering creative and effective solutions.

 

Ø  Strong understanding of Linux kernel internals, filesystems, Linux device management, networking, performance tuning, storage, and system services.

Ø  Contributor to numerous open-source projects. Tested and contributed source code patches and bug fixes to Linux kernel, glibc, and numerous other projects.  Contributed to the protection of Linux from legal challenges such as those from The SCO Group.

Ø  Additional expertise in SAN, NAS, databases, scripting, shell, C, perl, expect, and documentation.

 

 

·         ITIL Foundations for IT Service management, 2007

·         Red Hat Certified Engineer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (#804005373116542), 2005

·         Red Hat Certified Engineer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (#803004427312428), 2004

·         Microsoft Certified Professional and Certified Netware Administrator (expired)

 

 

I am currently very happy with my employment situation, and I am not interested in other opportunities at this time.

 

Red Hat, Inc.

Senior Software Maintenance Engineer (2013-Present)

I am a Senior Software Maintenance Engineer at Red Hat, Inc., where I provide backline engineering support for customer issues. I specialize in filesystems and the Linux kernel, and debug and solve customer issues and bugs with both the kernel and userspace. I have debugged, reported, and resolved numerous bugs, and have patches accepted to the Linux kernel and many userspace components.

 

UBS, Chicago, IL, 2006-2013

Linux Systems Engineer / Associate Director, DSS Engineering (2007-Present)
Contract Engineer (2006-2007)

 

Stood as company-wide expert on global Linux estate that grew from about 3,500 to over 9,000. Maintained high quality standards while Linux engineering team was reduced. Focused on server operating system builds, hardware testing and certification, system performance tuning, system testing and test automation, and enterprise virtualization. Evaluated and recommended hardware vendors and system configurations. Provided technical documentation regarding hardware and software builds. Provided third-level technical support for production escalation of issues. Advised on system tuning parameters and efficiency improvements. Investigated and resolved system performance problems. Interfaced with partners and customers during requirements gathering, engineering, and maintenance cycles. Evaluated and integrated new and future technologies, including SELinux, Linux containers, namespaces, cgroups, etc.

 

·         Improved platform stability and reduced costs by meeting expansion plans to transition various business units from legacy Sun SPARC hardware running Solaris to Linux systems running on X86 hardware.

·         rchitected and delivered a core update to 5,000 at-risk hosts within target 2-month timeframe to resolve a critical security vulnerability.

·         Diagnosed, identified, and resolved a number of Linux kernel and application bugs, including a Linux kernel bug causing unpredictable system hangs and out-of-market downtime conditions in several regions; created reproducer scripts and worked with the vendor to find the correct fix.

·         Enabled point-in-time backups of large database systems with no downtime or performance impact to the database by writing thousands of lines of scripts to orchestrate SAN-based device snapshots and manage Linux device availability.

 

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY, Provo, UT, 1998-2006

Systems Manager, Computer Science Department (1999-2006)

Laboratory Systems Manager (1998-2006)

 

Provided service support and delivery for departmental incident management, configuration, release, change, and capacity management. Hired and supervised employees. Delivered service for thousands of users on hundreds of Linux servers providing email, web, ssh, DNS, NFS and Samba services, SQL servers, ad-hoc database programming, and authentication services. Served as a technical resource for employees, faculty, students, research labs, and other University Systems Managers. Performed research in computer architecture and hardware performance. Architected, managed, and maintained the IP network infrastructure (including Gigabit and wireless networks), approximately 50 switches, routers, and firewalls.

 

·         Provided Linux/Unix system design, security, and administration, including management and 24x7 support for over 400 Linux servers, compute clusters, and open lab machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 and Fedora (Red Hat development/beta systems).

·         Configured, compiled, and tuned Linux kernel, working with x86 and User-Mode Linux (UML) architectures.

 

 

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY, Provo, UT

MS in Computer Science, 2002

·         Thesis work dealing with computer control of electronic hardware; additional research working with computer architecture and hardware performance issues.

 

BS in Computer Science, 1997

 

 

A Tall Tale About ELF. Groklaw, July 22, 2004, by Frank Sorenson, Dr Stupid and PJ.

Groklaw Takes A Closer Look at the ABI Files. Groklaw, January 30, 2004, by Frank Sorenson, Dr. Stupid, Harlan Wilkerson, Rand McNatt, Roland Buresund, and Pamela Jones.

The SCO Group's List of "Infringing" Files -- How Might They Have Come Up With This List? Groklaw, November 20, 2003, by Frank Sorenson.

Modeling IrDA Performance: The effect of IrLAP Negotiation Parameters on Throughput. 10th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN).

A System-Assisted Disk I/O Simulation Technique. 7th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems.

Client-Based Web Prefetch Management,.The Eighth International World Wide Web Conference.

A National Trace Collection and Distribution Resource. 1999 SPEC Workshop.