Geoff Halprin Position Managing Director, Principal Consultant Email geoff.halprin@sysadmin.com.au PGP Fingerprint (FE349AAD) 05 93 68 35 B2 09 8E 6F 79 8C 16 F8 8F BC 2E CB

Links

• Personal pages

Background

I have been playing around with computers for the past two decades or so. I started out with PDP-8s and PDP-11s, and was one of the first Apple ][ owners in Australia (it ran off a 110V transformer). In 1977 I co-founded The Apple User's Society of Melbourne (AUSOM), a group which now boasts over 1000 members. I have also spent time on the boards of The MicroComputer Club of Melbourne (MICOM), The Digital Equipment Computer User's Society (DECUS), the Victorian branch of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Sun User Group of Australia (SUG-OZ).

I spent a number of years alternating my roles between development and operations groups. This gave me great insight into the similarities and differences between the two sides of the Information Technology coin. I found it interesting that whilst huge efforts were going into defining methodologies and tools to aid software development, the operations and system support teams had to cope with whatever was thrown at them without any such assistance. (The world would be a better place if every software developer was forced to spend six months in a system support role.)

In 1987 I co-founded The Fulcrum Consulting Group and as its Technology Director began developing models for delivery of system support services to small businesses. I also began developing methodologies and toolkits to help myself and other system administrators as we moved from site to site. This included audit methodologies to assess the degree of entropy present at a site, and for retrofitting industry best practice to those sites.

In 1995 I founded The SysAdmin Group to continue this work.

System Administration is a fascinating and almost entirely misunderstood profession, and educating management and the general public as to the nature of this role is an integral part of SysAdmin.

I have recently completed my fourth term on the national management committee of The System Administrator's Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU). I am also serving my first two-year term on the Executive Committee of the USA-based The System Administrator's Guild (SAGE).