Chris Shenton

Arlington, VA 22207
703-850-1890
Chris@Shenton.Org

Independent Consultant, Washington, DC
December 1995 to Present

Established first ISP in country of Seychelles
In 1995, designed and deployed network using Cisco router, Penril industrial modems, Livingston Portmaster communications server. Installed and configured FreeBSD servers with RADIUS for authentication and accounting, and web, FTP, mail (SMTP, POP) services. Secured machines with ssh. Wrote software to perform analysis of accounting logs for billing. Work had to be completed in one week and system had to be robust, due to remote location of the customer. In 1997, returned to Seychelles and performed a total system upgrade (systems, operating system, server software, and IP address migration) to handle increased load. Continuing to provide long-distance technical support for systems, security, and other issues.
Contributor to SAIC proposal to US News and World Reports (November 1999)
Developed architecture for scalable, highly-available public web server for US News and World Reports proposal. Design included multiple firewalls and load-balancers to provide resilience and also separation of public data from private back-end databases. Was able to satisfy SAIC's urgent request for under-48-hour turn-around.

Nova.org / FCAC.org non-profit ISP, Fairfax, VA
1997 to present

Volunteer technical support for local public-access channel affiliated ISP.
Provided support for DNS and RADIUS dialin authentication, customer subnet delegations, security on Solaris and FreeBSD servers. Wrote custom code which interfaced Cistron RADIUS to Bay Networks dial-in system to gather statistics on logged-in users and detect multiple simultaneous dial-ins by unscrupulous users.

RMS Technologies, Inc., Lanham, MD
November 1994 to June 1998

Internet Engineering for NASA Headquarters
Developed secure web application including client-side certificate-based authentication. Collaborated on design of HQ firewall and migration architecture including redundancy, robustness, routing, network and namespace hiding, etc. Designing PGP key server for NASA Chief Information Officer for secure inter-Center email. Deploying strong-authentication dial-in access by integrating RADIUS with SecurID hardware tokens and ACE software. Authored whitepaper analyzing security issues surrounding Microsoft NetMeeting and augmented architectures to mitigate risk. Prototyped multicast product roll-out of Icast audio/video/text transmission products for use by the Administrator, Public Affairs, training, etc; software runs on PCs and Macs and is inter-operable with existing UNIX-based MBONE tools. HQ system security improvements including lock-down of operational machines, encrypted channel access for administrators, and responding to security incidents. Developed HQ "intranet" infrastructure security requirements; presented as a white paper to other NASA Centers.
Headquarters Dial-in Service
Replaced HQ's aging dial-in service with Ascend Max 4004s and RADIUS authentication/accounting; enhanced RADIUS code to use encrypted password database. Wrote web-based administrator front end so non-technical support staff can maintain users, and users can change passwords securely over the web with SSL (server certificate from VeriSign).
High-Profile Network Events and Demonstrations
Designed, built, and ran a network of UNIX, Mac, and PCs for a "Virtual Conference", connecting over 100 teachers and scientists at HQ to remote network participants by email, live transcription, web, and a variety of live audio and video feeds over the Internet. Designed and implemented an Internet video conference for Vice President Al Gore for an event at a hotel in DC; lead-time was under 48 hours and a phone line was the only network access.
Education and Outreach
Gave presentation to Moscow-area Internet community on Internet applications ranging from email to MBONE conferencing. Met with with representatives from Moscow science community (Institute for Kosmological Investigations, Moscow State University, Institute for Biomedical Problems) on how to take advantage of the growing Internet infrastructure. Met in Kiev with representatives from the United Nations, the International Science Foundation, and local RELCOM affiliate on how best to link the nascent Kiev internet into the NASA Science Internet.
NASA Email Initiative
Co-author for white paper to NASA Chief Information Officer which re-architected the existing, disparate, incompatible systems across the agency into a distributed client/server model; technical, administrative management, and migration issues are addressed as well as the technological challenges.

Sterling Federal Systems, Inc., Palo Alto, CA
October 1993 to November 1994

White House World Wide Web
Brought up the original White House Web server and responsible for significant portions of its design and content. Coordinated connecting the Office of Science and Technology Policy to the Internet from their LAN and remotely via SLIP. System administrator for a Sun Solaris system hosting the WWW development and DNS for ostp.eop.gov. Interacted extensively with OSTP and their contacts at NASA, MIT, UNC, ARPA, and other agencies.
Internet applications for NASA Headquarters
Developed and populated first NASA HQ Web server. Developed Internet-based prototypes for publishing NASA policy directives online will full-text searching, and an image database with free-text searching. Systems administrator for SGIs and Suns; technical point of contact for MBONE conferences over the Internet.

Hughes/STX, Lanham, MD
May 1985 to October 1993

NASA/GSFC Network Support Group
Supported NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Network Support Group for Large Systems. Developed and populated the main Gopher server and co-administered USENET news for the campus. Co-sysadm for the group's Sun network and provided network support to the GSFC community.
STX//FileManager for CalTech
Developed software and performed integration for product comprising UniTree virtual filesystem on Alliant mini-supercomputer with RAID and HIPPI channels to CalTech's Delta MPP supercomputer. Worked on-site at Alliant and CalTech for development and integration. Wrote libraries and code to run FTP and NFS over 80MB/sec HIPPI to Delta.
NASA/GSFC Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
Lead GSFC task in autonomous robotic systems including $600K robot and computer systems purchase. Researched automatic task planning and execution. Developed control/sensor software for GSFC "intelligent end effector", Prolog software to execute plans and respond to dynamic input and recover from errors, FORTRAN and MACRO-11 data acquisition and hardware interface code. Systems administrator for the robotics laboratory: HP/Apollo, SGI, Sun, DEC UNIX and VAX.
Proposals and Other Projects
Contributed to several STX proposals and projects in areas such as AI and geometric reasoning for robotics, migration from IBM/MVS to Cray UNIX with UniTree mass storage, ruggedized portable systems for DoD applications.

Consultant to ENW International, Ltd., Alexandria, Virginia
January 1985 to September 1987

Modeling
Enhanced and maintained a nuclear damage assessment software model written in Pascal, and developed other utilities to enhance its functionality.

Ketron, Incorporated, Arlington, Virginia
Summers 1979, 1981, and 1982

Simulation
Enhanced and modified an anti-submarine warfare commander real-time simulation. Developed and implemented the scenario designer and database for the simulation. Evaluated movement algorithms for ground forces in a theater-level war-game simulation used at the Army War College.

Operational Systems, Incorporated, Arlington, Virginia
Summer 1978

Software Tools
Developed software on early 8080-based microcomputers targeted at legal firms and other small businesses including client and inventory database and word processing package.

Fairfax County Public Schools, Falls Church, Virginia
September 1977 to June 1978

Software Tools
Volunteer programming for the director of FCPS Computer Science instruction facilities: developed a facile text editor and microcomputer emulator subsequently used by students in their course work.

Education

Awards, Certifications, Publications

http://chris.shenton.org/resume/
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