Prasad Dharmasena

Division of Information Technology

Manage servers and services in enterprise data centers to assist with the university's administrative and academic functions:

• Hardware: installation, cabling, problem diagnosis & resolution
• Operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, Solaris
• Scripting Languages: BASH/Shell, Perl, Python
• Virtualization: VMware, KVM, Solaris LDom, Docker Containers
• File systems: ZFS, OpenAFS, AuriStorFS
• Authentication systems: Kerberos

Support a diverse set of customers:

• Internal groups: Provide Linux systems for teams such as DBA, IT Security, Backups, Storage, Software development, Network engineering, and Network operations.
• Instructors and students: manage a set of servers used by the Computer Science and Engineering faculty members to teach classes. Install and configure software, compilers and tools required for instructional work.
• Departmental system administrators: provide RHEL and Ubuntu as managed OSes to academic departments.
• Students/Faculty/Staff: manage Linux systems where the university population can login for shell access, set up personal web sites and run software such as Matlab, SAS and R.
• Research groups: set up large converged systems with multi-TB disk space for scientific computational work.

Institute for Systems Research

Served as the Institute's primary system administrator as well as the deputy to the Directory of Computing. Provided office automation and research computing support for faculty, grad students and the administrative staff. Managed a highly technical computing infrastructure for the systems research labs.

• Managed 300+ Sun/Solaris, Mac, Windows machines
• Designed and built the compute infrastructure for Engineering and Computer Science research
• Configured and maintained network switches, lan bridges, hubs and punch-down blocks
• Hardware/OS installation and configuration
• Worked with faculty members and researchers to install scientific software
• Backups, troubleshooting, end-user support
• Made hardware upgrade and purchase decisions

Worked with a team of expatriate Sri Lankan academics in the US to provide the first dial-up Internet connection to the island's university network. Raised funds and supplied technical assistance for the organization to obtain the .lk TLD. Assisted with the operation of the dial-up link.

• Served as the primary system administrator during May, 1997 - July 1999
• Managed a Linux system which functioned as the secondary DNS server and mail exchanger for the .lk domains.

Division of Research and Statistics

Worked as a programmer in the Automation and Research Computing section to provide technical assistance to the Board's economists.

• Wrote C and C++ code to develop an econometric modeling tool
• Integrated the above modeling tool with Mathematica and Splus