My name is Ian Farr, and I am a professional I.T Architect, Administrator, and Developer with 15+ years of experience in the I.T. industry. I have worked in all types of companies, from small start-ups, to large enterprises. As a team player, I have had the opportunity to work with teams of all sizes, from just a few people, to hundreds of people across many departments, branches, locations, countries, time-zones.

I am used to working in high-pressure environments with many projects and timelines with hard dates that must be met, and with many distractions and/or interruptions throughout the work-day as I continue to mentor or deal with production impacting events. As such, I am highly motivated, a very hard worker, and am constantly researching new technologies and self-learning in order to better myself. As my experience and technical skill-set continues to grow, so does my ability to create more complete and in-depth architectures, as I draw from past experiences and deep knowledge of many systems and technologies.

Over the years I have mentored many people, and have honed my teaching skills while training Junior and Intermediate level individuals on most of the below mentioned technologies (if not all of them).

Notable projects over the years

• Many MS Exchange Migrations
  • 5.5 -> 2000, 2000 -> 2003, 2003 -> 2010
• Exchange Architecture Designs/Redesigns
  • 2003 Clustering
  • 2010 DAG’s & CAS Array’s with Hardware Load-Balancing
• Many A.D. Architecture Design’s/Re-designs and migrations:
  • World-Wide multi-site deployments
  • Novel -> NT/AD
  • NT -> 2000
  • 2000 -> 2003 upgrades
  • 2003 -> 2008/2012r2 upgrades
• Application-Only E-mail Server Creation
  • To Protect MS Exchange Environment
  • each unique sender has a quota of N e-mails per period of time (minutes, hours, day(s))
  • Abusers get punished, but do not affect other senders
    • Abusers will be trickled out over time (N e-mails released every M minutes)
  • Technologies used to create the solution
    • Linux, Postfix, Python
• Terminal Server -> Citrix 7.5 Migration
• Citrix 7.5 -> 7.6 Migration
• F5 Platform Migrations and upgrades
• Citrix Netscaler Deployment
• Citrix CloudBridge 5000 series WCCP deployment with CISCO routers
• Citrix CloudBridge VPX Architecture and Deployment on VMWare ESX
• File Server Migrations
  • Namespace changes (local -> DFS (standalone on a cluster & domain DFS namespaces)
  • standalone -> cluster
  • cluster -> cluster (2003 -> 2008r2/2012r2)
  • Creation of ShareMan to manage shares on a 2008r2 cluster
    • Microsoft Dropped Cluster Shares in 2008+
    • ShareMan can auto share all subfolders of a given parent, and register them all in DFS
    • ShareMan can also share specific folders, and take care of registering them in DFS
    • Advantages: Load-Balance your LUNs while maintaining a single namespace easily.
• Terminal Server Farm Management
  • Creation of TSSMon & RDSMon to keep track of user sessions over time and generate reports
  • Great Help Desk tool to see where users are, and where they used to be, when they logged on at etc..
• Creation of multiple labs, from Virtual labs, to physical labs that model real-world WAN scenarios.

There have obviously been many more, but the above are some of the more memorable ones.

Technologies

• Microsoft Technologies:
  • Active Directory
    • NT4 -> 2000 -> 2003 -> 2008 -> 2008r2 -> 2012 -> 2012r2
    • GPO/GPP creation/reviews/management
  • Exchange:
    • 5.0, 5.5, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010
    • 2010+ HA (DAG)
    • 2003 HA (Clustering)
  • Windows Server OS:
    • NT4, 2000, 2003, 2008, 2008r2, 2012, 2012r2
    • Terminal Services
    • FIle/Print
    • Clustering (Exchange 2003, MS SQL, File Servers)
    • IIS (in load-balanced configurations)
  • Windows Desktop OS:
    • DOS, 3.1, 95, 98, ME (yuck), 2000 Pro, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10
  • MS SQL
    • SQL Server 7 -> 2014
• Citrix Technologies:
  • XenApp 6.5, 7.5, 7.6
  • NetScaler Load Balancers
  • CloudBridge WAN Accelerators
    • including various WCCP configurations
    • Comfortable with VPX platforms, as well as SDX 2000 & 5000 series platforms
    • Current up to the latest 7.4 platform
  • StoreFront, PVS, Delivery Controllers, Directors, Licensing Servers, SQL Databases architected, delivered, and teams trained.
  • Custom Installer created based on NSIS to properly remove and update receiver components on the client side
• *nix Technologies:
  • Distributions:
    • Red-Hat/CentOS/Oracle Linux
    • Debian/Ubuntu
    • Arch Linux
    • Gentoo Linux
    • OpenSuse/SLES
    • FreeBSD
    • OpenBSD
    • NetBSD
    • PFSense
  • Web Servers:
    • Apache
    • Nginx
  • Databases
    • MySQL/MariaDB
    • PostgreSQL
  • Mail:
    • sendmail
    • postfix
  • Network Services:
    • DNS
    • DHCP
    • Firewall (IPChains, IPTables)
    • Proxy (Squid)
    • LoadBalacing (HA Proxy)
• Virtualization Technologies:
  • VMware
  • XenServer
  • Hyper-V
•  Networking Technologies:
  • Firewalls/Proxy
    • Netscreen/Juniper
    • SonicWall
    • CheckPoint
    • PFSense
    • IPChains/IPTables
    • Microsoft ISA
    • Squid
  • Load-Balancers
    • F5
    • Netscaler
    • Foundry
    • HA Proxy
  • Routing
    • CISCO
    • Foundry
    • Linux
    • Microsoft (RRAS)
  • Ethernet Switching
    • CISCO
    • FOUNDRY
    • Extreme Networks
    • HP
    • 3COM
  • WAN Technologies
    • IP VPN
    • MPLS
  • WAN Acceleration
    • Riverbed
    • Expand Networks
    • Citrix CloudBridge
• Storage Technologies:
  • Local Attached Arrays and RAID Sets (0,1,5,6,10,50…)
    • Local Drive Bay Arrays
    • External Arrays connected through SCSI -> SATA/SAS -> FC
  • SAN Technologies
    • Network Attached
    • Fiber Channel
• Languages/Development Environments:
  • VBScript
  • Powershell
  • Python
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • HTML
  • Javascript
  • DOS/Batch Files
  • Bash/Shell Scripts
  • SQL/TSQL
  • C#
  • VB
  • VB.NET
  • PASCAL/Object Pascal (Lazarus)
  • Visual Studio
  • Netbeans
  • Eclipse
• Source Control:
  • CVS
  • SVN
  • Mercurial (Hg)
  • GIT
  • Source Safe/Team Foundation