Fern ICT Limited - Professional support
Welcome
Contact
Support
News
Privacy

Fern ICT Limited


ICT Consultant

Adrian Fern

Since graduating with an honours degree in Computer Studies (1987), Adrian has developed a valuable mix of skills during an unbroken permanent career including 12 years with the Natural Environment Research Council, Research Vessel Services.

More recently, he provided over 4 years technical expertise and team leadership for Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories Innovations, Optical Networks Group, Network Management Systems division as a Principal Software Engineer.

On departing from Lucent, Adrian decided to take up the challenge of working for himself and, until the formation of Fern ICT Limited, has been providing services as an independent, freelance ICT Consultant.

Adrian brings a network of highly skilled, industry trained technical associates and consultants to Fern ICT. This network gives us an impressive portfolio of expertise and an enviable technical knowledge-base.
Adrian joined NERC Research Vessel Services as a full time employee in 1988. Having previously enjoyed a year long Industrial Training post as part of his degree course, he was delighted to return to RVS and enjoyed another 11 years working at the leading edge of scientific research and exploration.

Research Vessel Services manages, maintains and operates the NERC fleet of multi-role Royal Research Ships (RRS Discovery, RRS Charles Darwin and RRS Challenger), providing comprehensive scientific facilities and skilled technical support both ashore and afloat.

During his time with RVS, the research vessel base was relocated from Barry, South Wales to the Southampton Oceanography Centre. SOC is a designated international Centre of Excellence for Oceanographic Research and is housed in a purpose built dockside facility administered by the University of Southampton.

On marrying and starting a family Adrian decided to "retire from the sea" and joined Lucent Technologies. RVS has since restructured and consolidated its position within the Ocean Engineering Division of SOC and has spun off the NERC Research Ship Unit which manages and operates the fleet.
star Role ashore
  • developed shipborne, distributed, realtime data logging and processing system using embedded C code running on OS9 and SunOS/Solaris platforms
  • developed oceanographic and meteorological sampling devices with embedded C and assembler using in-house message protocols to transfer data to concentrator/logger.
  • developed satellite high speed data link for ship-to-shore IP connectivity utilizing network programming skills including: TCP-IP, UDP, SMP, Sockets, RPC, etc.
  • developed oceanographic data processing applications, mainly in C, using acquired expertise in navigation processing (Loran, GPS, GLONASS, inertial platforms) and oceanographic/meteorological sampling
  • produced graphical data editor and visualisation suite using X and Motif library functions
  • planned operations and procedures for team members to implement at sea
  • provided help desk support and training for seagoing computing staff
  • integrated Simrad EM12-S120 multibeam echo sounder and processing system
  • migrated oceanographic processing systems from SunOS to Solaris environment when upgrading shipborne computing facilities across the fleet.
star Role at sea
  • operated, administered and maintained ship's electronic/computing facilities, encompassing navigation/scientific instrumentation and complex data processing systems and networks
  • provided multibeam swath data acquisition and processing expertise
  • provided advice on survey planning and management to principal scientist
  • responsible for data quality assurance, visualisation, archival and distribution
  • supported and integrated visiting scientists' computing equipment and applications
  • was solely responsible for maintaining systems 24x7 in hostile conditions with limited shipboard resources

Having spent about four accumulated years of his life in harsh and sometimes dangerous conditions at sea, Adrian has used his interpersonal skills to help others cope during times of acute stress. Living and working together with a unique range of personnel (captain to ABS, university professors to students) in close proximity, for up to 40 days and without external contact, requires a level head and excellent people management skills.

Adrian joined Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs Innovations in the summer of 1998, staying with the organisation for just over 4 years.

Bell Labs Network Management Systems division develops the software that configures, controls, manages and provides service assurance for the global telecommunications networks deployed for its customers around the world by Lucent Technologies.

While at Lucent, Adrian's department moved from Malmesbury to Swindon as part of the Wiltshire consolidation project and he was deeply involved in planning and implementing the network and systems infrastructure migration, taking special interest in the relocation of the development laboratory.

Adrian's designated role was in the Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) Team where he specialised in software product packaging, deployment and configuration. As the UNIX systems and infrastructure technical authority, Adrian took responsibility for managing the OAM Packaging Team and developing an automated, on-line document driven, component based solution packaging and deployment system.
star Role as Principal Engineer
  • undertake technical project work for system build, packaging, deployment and recovery; primarily for HP-UX 10/11.x and also providing for Sun Solaris 2.x
  • provide hardware specification, capacity planning, kernel and platform tuning for a range of servers up to 9000 series
  • implement major new software sub-systems and releases
  • produce document driven platform deployment method for component based solutions
  • provide thirdparty and middleware packaging, deployment and configuration
  • implement system deployment and upgrade procedures
  • provide platform start-up/shutdown, resource monitoring and toolbox utilities
  • owner of ongoing support for development, test and live environments
  • provision of high availability, hardened and geographically redundant systems (mirroring/ServiceGuard)
  • undertake code, OS, data and platform development/migrations under change control
  • provide product localisation, foreign language packs and oversee translations
  • liaising with other teams in production of complex, turnkey, n tier architecture
  • derive procedures and methods in accordance with company policy on ISO9001 accreditation
star Areas of Technical Expertise
  • UNIX platforms (HP and SUN)
  • UNIX scripting (Korn, Bourn, C-Shell, sed, awk, perl, yacc, lex, etc.)
  • change control and development environments (SABLIME, SCCS)
  • build and packaging (SD-UX, Ignite-UX, pkgadd, [n]make, auto generation from on-line documents, building to multiple vendor targets)
  • platform configuration (HP-Openview, rc scripts, LVM, Veritas VxFS, NFS, cron, etc.)
  • network management (DNS, NIS, sendmail, http, ftp, tftp, bootp, dhcp, etc.)
  • relational database provisioning (Oracle, Informix, SQL)
  • product localisation (unicode, iso88591, msg files, etc.)
  • infrastructure configuration (apache, tomcat, java, CORBA, Orbix, Roguewave, Tuxedo, Baseworx)
  • client platform deployments (Windows NT / 2000 and browser enabled devices)

Because of the nature of the work Adrian and his team undertook at Lucent, they soon became the technical "back stop" for many support issues. If 1st, 2nd, and 3rd line support teams could not resolve a major system or application problem, then it would eventually cross Adrian's desk. If he and his team could not solve it, then it was deemed to be unresolvable problem and a new development cycle would be initiated.


Home