Work Experiences

Over the 8 years I was involved in designing, configuring, troubleshooting, and re-configuring many Cisco routers and ASA firewalls for WAN connections from hotels back to the main IHG network. I liaised with various customers and 3rd parties in order to correctly determine the solution required and the configuration needed. In total we had around 100 site-to-site VPNs, 6 CheckPoint firewalls, 250 WAN routers and around 1000 Cisco switches, which I administered. These required static and BGP routing updates, rule changes and auditing, and a knowledge of MPLS networks as new services were required.
I wrote a searchable website for our internal Software Repository in ASP, and created several custom VBScript, PowerShell and batch files to fix problems, monitor internal systems and configure user settings. I was also one of the escalation points for the 3rd line technical support team.
During the Exchange 5.5 decommissioning, I wrote a process to create an equivalent to the Global Address List from an Active Directory export which was filtered and imported into OpenLDAP.
I also helped in a global roll out of F5 Big-IP devices to provide SSO and fail-over for our extranet.
For the last 4 years I was heavily involved in helping 2 corporate offices and 86 hotels gain PCI-DSS v1.2 and v2 compliance, which included helping local IT Managers get their own hotels compliant and offering guidance. This included analysing reports from vulnerability scans, re-mediating issues and producing security documentation.
In the last year I changed teams and visited various hotels around the UK and Europe to help migrate them from “Managed” status to “Franchised”, or vice-versa, and re-install servers after security incidents or for upgrades.
In 2014 I was heavily involved in testing Windows 7. I travelled to various UK and European sites to install Windows 7 and 2008/2012 with new hardware, and travelled to hotels to help with application, network and server hardware upgrades.
As part of our goal of being ITIL compliant, I documented the process for doing various installation tasks which are now being used as standards to follow.
In 2013 I spent several weeks helping design, and then configure the hardware and software at a flagship hotel in Davos, Switzerland. This involved being on-site for 2½ weeks to complete the installation.
My manager frequently mentioned (and was pleased!) that I was the “go to” person for other colleagues in the same department, including the helpdesk and corporate infrastructure teams.
In 2015 I was the project co-ordinator for a Point Of Sale upgrade to further secure our hotels.
For the last 4 years I was appointed as one of the fire marshals for the department.

This included the setting-up/administration of around 70 PCs on a Windows NT4/Netware 3.12/AIX 4.x network, with a mixture of Windows 3.xx, 95, 98, NT 4 and OS/2 Workstations.

As well as day-to-day administration of the network, when the Manager of Information Systems left, I took over their work. This included: administering the student database system, completing returns to the FEFC (Further Education Funding Council), and producing reports in MS Access and SQL for management.

In the last year I became the Year 2000 Project Manager, helped choose and implement a new finance system, and designed and implemented a new phone and structured cabling system for the college. I also created a web site at broomfield.ac.uk and started an intranet including links into the student database, a plant identification test for students, and started writing a document management system in ASP.
From these web pages I designed the new college prospectus.

During the last few months I was involved with a European project called “Adapt Microlink 2000”. It was a project to help declining industries (i.e. agriculture) learn new skills (including basic IT) by distance learning. My role included installing new hardware and software on remote sites, and giving presentations to our partners.

As part of our university course, we went to Bordeaux for 1½ years (in total). During the 3rd year, we spent 6 months at a university in Bordeaux studying computing, and 6 months in a placement at Aquitainergie. This was a department of the local council, which specialised in doing feasibility studies and giving grants for renewable energy projects. The web site I designed was at aquarel.fr/aquitainergie. Unfortunately it didn’t change much since I left, and has now disappeared completely. I also started work on a web site for a partner organisation called FEDARENE (fedarene.org), which has grown nicely since.

Worked at Derby University in the Personnel Department during the summer holidays, doing reports and SQL-like queries in Revelation, as well as general technical support.

The first project was to help updating physical and logical network diagrams, create Bill Of Materials documents, and prepare change requests for Cisco switch reconfiguration and DNS / DHCP records for a third-party’s firewall replacement project.
The current project is to write processes and documentation to upgrade their security posture – creating a new IDS policy, tidying up firewall rules for Cisco Firewalls, as well as defining standards and implementing global firewall rules to cover multiple sites, as well as various other network changes. Site migrations were scheduled and executed to configure IDS and standardize various settings.

During the first week I was sent to Exeter to be the local IT support to help with problems that arose as services were being commissioned at a new hotel. After I helped with the AC Hotels project we started before COVID-19 to migrate some hotels in Spain to the Marriott standard, and configuring devices for 2 new hotels in Mallorca and Rome. Next I was sent to Stockholm to wipe devices and migrate data, ready for the hotel to be taken over by a franchise. Lastly, I migrated 2 file and print servers, updated the PowerShell login scripts, and trained a permanent employee on how to do this themselves in future.

I was the Design Authority for new infrastructure as part of an “in-sourcing” project to migrate the Council away from an under-performing third party. This involved setting up from scratch: VMWare 7 (on HP servers), Cisco 9300 switches, Checkpoint 6200 firewalls, a DMZ, Active Directory & GPOs. I set up NPS & LDAP connections to integrate non-Windows authentication systems. I also documented a complicated and un-documented network and physical building using NetBox and DokuWiki. and set up a network monitoring system using NetXMS and Grafana, creating templates and filing bug-reports and feature requests with the community. I re-purposed several thin-client devices using Ubuntu to set up wallboards for 2 departments. I was the technical “go-between” to make sure the third-party would hand over access to various systems, and make sure they were usable and useful. I was instrumental in coming up with a plan to test and execute a migration of ~30 Windows and Red Hat servers from the third-party to the new on-premise infrastructure over a weekend, which was very stressful but successful and under-budget. I then handed over and trained a permanent Senior Network Engineer to take over when my contract ended.

This involved working in the London and Manchester offices, helping out with BAU tickets, sanity-checking and troubleshooting firewall requests, raising changes for Palo Alto and Checkpoint firewalls, dealing with SSL certificate creation and renewal, administering the Bluecoat proxy policies and keeping assets up to date in Service-Now.

This involved travelling to many UK & European corporate offices and hotels to assist in large scale IT Infrastructure / Network security / IT migration projects after the acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts. It involved engaging with multiple system owners in carrying out AD consolidation, Windows 10 Desktop Upgrades, Server 2016 Upgrades, security assessments as part of a PCI / GDPR compliance workstream, supportive documentation, including security policies and procedures, user accounts, process, and change management. PowerShell scripts were created in order to add functionality for user configuration and to smooth Active Directory migration processes. Various networking devices, desktops and servers were migrated - Cisco, HP ProCurve, Windows 2003, 2008, 2008R2, 2016 servers and Windows 7 & 10 workstations, as well as embedded devices. These were all reconfigured to connect to the Marriott network securely. I was heavily involved in training internal system administrators and external contractors.

This included planning and migrating servers from their hotels and data centres into Azure and Hyper-V environments. Liaising with third parties, on-site staff and group HQ IT staff was performed in order to plan and implement a successful migration from Hotel Perfect to Hosted Opera PMS and associated 3rd party interfaces. General design advice was given on implementing an entirely new converged network that would be PCI-DSS 3.2 compliant, as well as new hardware and security systems for their 2 head offices and 20 hotels.

Work included configuring their standard desktop image for new hardware, and updating software to be deployed.
Solarwinds was installed and configured for monitoring network devices and servers, together with other modules for User Device Tracking, Netflow and event log collection. A Windows 2012 VM image was created to use as a template for future VMs.

Work included travelling to various UK locations to install WAN and LAN hardware, test connectivity and liaise with ISPs and other 3rd parties to successfully upgrade the network infrastructure. I also helped with configuring and documenting their new datacentre, and scanning for and fixing vulnerabilities on the new equipment. I was also deeply involved with setting up networking equipment for a new 1500-port office, both for internal users and 3rd party systems, and troubleshooting associated problems.

This was to help the IT manager migrate Windows servers to a new domain, remove devices from an old subnet and upgrade the Server OS. Server and workstation hardening was also performed using GPOs, and standard builds of Windows 7 & 10 were created using Microsoft’s WAIK, MDT and WDS tools.

This was a 2-week contract to help scan one of SCC’s clients’ networks using Outpost24 “Hacker In A Box” software, and troubleshoot network connections.