Projects

Most of the work we've done over the years has been project work, implementing and configuring software as part of real-world IT systems.

Here are some examples of the sort of systems we've designed and implemented:

• We designed and installed a multi-site Asterisk-based telephone system for one of our longest-standing subcontract clients, when they opened a new head office, and also opened two new branch offices. The result was a 7-site Asterisk server setup providing service to hundreds of staff, with secure connections between every pair of sites, using load-balanced ISDN connections at each site to provide sufficient connectivity for the company, but minimising line rental costs at each individual site. We also implemented a hot-desking login/logout system for the company.

• One of our more recent subcontract projects was to help with the setup and configuration of 20 physical machines and around 40 virtual servers in a new data centre. One of the requirements was to be able to remotely reinstall a machine from bare metal (or a non-existent virtual image) as quickly and consistently as possible. We created a DHCP / PXE / Debian Installer configuration which could build a new machine from empty disks, with no manual intervention, within 15 minutes (faster for a virtual server). The end customer then used puppet to install a consistent set of applications and configuration files to get the servers functional.

• We've designed and implemented large-scale and complex content filtering web proxy services for two different educational institutions over the years. In both cases High Availability and Load Balancing were requirements, as were different degrees of filtering for different age groups of end users. In one case we created a system servicing approximately 250,000 end users, in the other there were around 40,000.

• As one of the few ventures in which we've supplied pre-configured hardware as a plug-in-and-go system to customers, we created Linux / IPtables-based firewall systems with up to 40 network interfaces, specifically for the multi-occupancy office market (when it was economically infeasible for each tenant to get their own dedicated Internet link in a shared building). These enabled managed service office space providers to offer secured Internet access to their tenants as part of the standard heat / light / power / telephone service package.