2byteconsulting - Linux and FreeBSD server tuning, security, scripting, and development services

Freelance Consulting - March 2003 to Present

Newschoolers Site Build

September 2003 - Ongoing..

Newschoolers.com is an ever-evolving social-networking site, dedicated to the youth skiing market. Paul's primary role is the design & development of the software that makes up Newschoolers.com. Suggestions for site improvements are welcomed by the site's operators, as well as it's very active community. Paul's work includes creating interface mock-ups based on feedback, and creating the functioning site from the sample pages. In addition to site development, Paul is responsible for server maintenance & upgrades, backup management, disaster recovery & all other things technical.

Health Canada Asset Inventory

November 2005 - October 2006

Health Canada, a department of The Government Of Canada, is implementing a system to discover, categorise & track all the department's IT assets from every office across Canada. Paul's role is to analyse asset data captured from these many sources, and to re-format the data into uniform standards for import into Health Canada's asset tracking & financial systems.

LSO War Game Scenarios

January 2004 - December 2004

Paul helped to design and implement live "war game" scenarios as part of an online security training course for Learn Security Online. This project included two Unix challenges and one advanced TCP/IP challenge. Paul was part of a two man team that developed these war game servers which challenge students to demonstrate learning and skills in topics such as debugging, exploit development, password recovery, covert channels, and port knocking. The scenarios ran in isolated remote-shell environments so players could attack systems on their training network, without interfering with the host server or other players.

ISP Server Manager

March 2004 - April 2004

Participated in the design and implementation of an automated account management system for an ISP based on server agents, a MySQL back-end, and a PHP based front-end. Paul was responsible for the overall software & interface design, and evaluating integration of server management software with the individual servers. This project brought together capabilities from diverse server OS components and software into a single web based front-end and MySQL based back-end management system.

Telnet Co-Pilot

July 2004 - August 2004

Participated in the design and implementation of a custom Telnet Proxy service that allowed multiple clients to share a single telnet session. A remote server could use XML to instruct the Telnet Proxy to create & destroy proxy sessions. Once a proxy was enabled, many clients could connect and simultaneously interact with the shell. Paul's role for this project was as a primary developer.

Avalonworks / IGS - September 2002 - April 2005

Network Monitoring & Intrusion Detection

November 2004 - December 2004

Avalonworks hosts servers for the Government of Canada, and many other private sector companies. They had decided to switch their network monitoring system from Big Brother to Nagios, as well as implement an intrusion detection system (IDS) based on SNORT & ACID. Paul was tasked with building, testing & measuring the systems for network monitoring and intrusion detection.

Windows NT to 2K/AD Network Migration

January 2004 - October 2004

The Avalonworks / IGS network environment contained servers & desktops that ran on a mix of Windows NT, Windows 2K and Windows 98, making administration & security patching difficult. Paul built a new Windows 2K network using Active Directory Services to help manage all of the network desktops and servers. All users, their mail, NAS files, services & permissions were migrated to this one standardised system for easier management, after thorough tests to ensure a clean & error-free transition.

Public Works and Government Services of Canada - January 2002 - April 2002

Software Asset & Data Analysis

January 2002 - April 2002

Public Works And Government Services Of Canada (PWGSC) began a project to discover and record every commercial software license in use by their department. With a list of applications in the millions, it was Paul's responsibility to evaluate data integrity, and design reports that would allow PWGSC to know how many of each type of software was in use, not in use, and being retired. Retired software applications could be used to obtain cheaper "upgrade" licenses from vendors to save the Government Of Canada money on new software acquisitions.

Programming Skills

C/C++ (*Nix & Windows Environments)

Perl

PHP

Csh/Tcsh/Bash shell scripting

HTML & Javascript

SQL

XML

HC11 Assembly

8051 Compatible uP

68000 Assembly

Operating Systems

Linux (Debian, Redhat, Fedora, Mandrake, Ubuntu)

FreeBSD (4, 5, 6)

Windows (98, 2000, XP, Server, Adv. Server, Active Directory)

Sun Solaris (7, 8, 9)

QNX

DOS

Databases

MySQL

MSSQL & Access

Services

Apache

IIS

Mysql

MSSQL & Access

Samba

ProFTPD

BSD Packet Filter (ipfw, natd, ipf, ipnat)

Snort & ACID Intrusion Detection

Nagios Network Monitor

Win2K Active Directory Services

IPTables & IPChains

Bind DNS Server

Hardware

Knowledge of specification for ISA, PCI, AGP, DDR-SDRAM, PC chipset and x86 architecture

VHDL (Mentor Graphics, Max Plus, FPGAs)

HC11 & HC12

Pic uP

8051 series uP

Serial & Parallel data transmission (USB, COM, Ethernet, Modbus)

Paul Stanisci