Work Recent Work

Dragonfly Science

Hosting / System Administration / Network Management
Client   Dragonfly Limited
Date   2009+
Website   dragonfly.co.nz

Dragonfly Science carries out independent statistical modelling and analysis.

Role

Maintaining office machines, internet hosting platforms and customer-facing databases and managing the company's backup and security systems. Trusted to provide a secure online server environment for sensitive statistical data.

Client description of Clone

Eyede

System Administration / Network Management / Development
Client   Eyede Solutions Limited
Date   2012+
Website   eyede.com

Eyede is a software and card solutions company specialising in the development of secure online software and card solutions.

Role

Providing IT development and support, including: network and server support, data migrations, PHP development, .NET application hosting, virtualisation, system security.

pfSense Open Source Firewall Distribution

C Development / Embedded Computing / Firewalling
Client   pfSense
Date   2008+
Website   pfsense.org

pfSense is a free, open-source customised distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability.

Role

Specialised FreeBSD enhancements to provide base and custom features for the firewall appliance.

Scoop

Varnish / Web Acceleration / System Administration / Network Management
Client   Scoop Media Limited
Date   2007+
Website   scoop.co.nz

Leading independent news.

Role

Providing support and oversight for their self-hosted web publishing platform. Managing all aspects of their server farm to ensure a fast and reliable web presence backed by FreeBSD reliability.

TrueNet

C Development / Embedded Computing / Network Measurement
Client   TrueNet Limited
Date   2010+
Website   truenet.co.nz

TrueNet is a company dedicated to the accurate measurement and reporting of broadband measurement.

Role

Designed the software and hardware for a system that monitors and reports on the state of New Zealand's broadband services throughout the country. The system runs on embedded MIPS hardware.

WhosOnLocation

Web Hosting / System Administration / Architecture
Client   WhosOnLocation Limited
Date   2009+
Website   whosonlocation.com

WhosOnLocation helps you manage people in your organisation. As a cloud-based solution, it can manage multiple sites in real time, scale to suit any organisation and create the depth of interface that suits your individual business needs.

Role

Architecure and management of the complete hosting platform for the WhosOnLocation SaaS application in three geographical locations. The key focus is on redundancy, security, monitoring and scaling while moving the platform forward in a world of changing technology.

Client description of Clone

View Work:

Services What's on Offer

I provide consultancy services for software development, system architecture and infrastructure support.

FreeBSD Consultancy
I have been a FreeBSD committer since 2005 when I saw the need for better bridging in my favourite operating system. I worked on bringing the bridge code over from NetBSD and then made further enhancements, including rapid spanning tree support. Since then I have contributed code to:
  • packet filtering
  • 802.11 wireless
  • USB stack and drivers
  • link aggregation
  • ARM and MIPS platforms.
Most projects have been pursuing my interests, and some have been sponsored, which is great. FreeBSD is my preferred web hosting platform - I have clients running multi-server environments for publishing and SaaS applications. I know FreeBSD inside and out, so if you are looking for local support or development in New Zealand (or abroad) please get in contact with me.

Software Development
I do general programming, mostly in C and also PHP/Perl/Lua. I particularly enjoy systems code such as networking protocols or interfacing abc to xyz. A recent project was a bi-directional SMS messaging system utilising the beanstalk work queue. The messages going through our system needed to be robust and auditable with a full end-to-end monitoring system.

Web Hosting and Optimisation
The old days of generating the html for every page view are over - even using in-language caching is very inefficient. If you have a high-volume site (or dream of one) and each page load hits your application code, life will be painful. A web accelerator such as Varnish in front of the web server will greatly improve performance and make the site feel snappy.

Network Infrastructure and Management
I manage the networks, servers and general infrastructure for several companies and provide remote system monitoring. Often I will have fixed the issue before the client is even aware of it.

Customised Solutions
Need something a bit different? I have provided custom solutions where the client needed something out of the ordinary, such as;
  • captive portal for hundreds of vlans without broadcast issues
  • SCADA firewalling, filter on Modbus/DNP3/CIP/ProfiNet op codes.

Platforms

  • FreeBSD
  • NetBSD
  • pfSense
  • Ubiquiti EdgeOS
  • Linux
  • OpenWRT

Languages

  • C
  • Lua
  • PHP
  • Perl
  • SQL

Applications

  • Varnish Cache
  • Apache/Nginx
  • Postfix
  • Nagios
  • Cacti
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL

About Clone

Andrew

Andrew Thompson

I have been working in Wellington and abroad in various roles since 2000 - all of course in the computing industry. It's easiest to just point to my LinkedIn page as it has all the details. You probably already know someone on my list or have a common connection somewhere.

Friends of Clone

Molehill Creations Molehill Creations provides web development (the html/js/css stuff) and iPhone application development.

Contact Me

You can email me.

Give me a call on +64 27 296 4506.