Services

Linux, Unix, Solaris, Open Source consultants, 30+ years experience - $140/hr. (see our rate card (PDF) for details)

Note: Due to strong ongoing demand for our services, we recommend you email or call us (831-469-3382) immediately in order to ensure we are available to meet your needs. We are available for work across the San Francisco Bay Area and California as a whole (travel premiums and other surcharges may apply in certain cases).

Qualifications and Experience Count

I, Thomas Leavitt, work with Ubuntu Desktop, OS X, and Windows 7/10 on a daily basis on a personal and professional level, as well as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Solaris and Windows Server at client sites. I run Windows 7/10 and Linux (Ubuntu and other distros) in virtual machines on my iMac and Macbook Air using VMware Fusion, and Windows 10 on my Dell Latitude laptop. I also run a variety of Linux distributions via VMWare vSphere (and other virtualization systems) at client sites, and on my cloud hosted personal server (my contractors all favor Linux on the server side as well). Over the course of my career, I've also run Mandriva Linux, various BSD flavors, RedHat of varying vintages, Solaris x86 (when that was really icky), Solaris on Sparc, and HP/UX, on my in house desktops and servers (even Windows NT 3.5 back in the day). In corporate networks, I've dealt with Windows NT 3.51, 4.0 and 2000/2003/2008/2012/2016 on the server side (as well as OS X, Linux and Unix). I also administered a Sybase database that handled 25 million atomic transactions a day on a maxed out Sun Sparc S1000E in the late 1990s for my web hosting start up. Basically, I install, configure and play with Linux distros and open-source software for entertainment (I also have Haiku OS, ReactOS, AROS and Icaros Desktop in VMs on my laptop). Some of the projects I've worked on include doing a full P2V migration of a client's infrastructure to vSphere, doing a forklift upgrade of an entire organization's desktop infrastructure from Windows XP to Windows 7, Samba/winbind and ADS integration, secure Intranet application integration with an LDAP directory via TLS/SSL, and upgrade/install/configuration of Bugzilla, Testlink, MediaWiki, Trac, DokuWiki, DocMgr (wiki), OpenFiler in a High Availability configuration, and installation of a secondary hard drive into a 1990's era desktop PC running a SCO Unix based POS.

I can handle system administration, troubleshooting, configuration, and installation tasks for just about any flavor of Unix, Linux or Unix like systems there is - if I don't know how to do something, I can figure it out. I'm primarily a systems and network services level guy, with some DBA and coding experience, but I can handle application deployment and configuration as well. I'm not a Cisco geek, but I understand networking well enough to be able to hold an intelligent conversation with one. I'm not a coder, but I've written thousands of lines of code in Perl, PHP, Python and MySQL, and can read and understand what most code is intended to do - I often find myself debugging and tweaking open source software, in fact, as well as legacy customer code in Perl, Python and PHP.

My rates (and those of my contractors) are reasonable for our level of skill, the decades worth of experience in varied environments we bring to the table, and the proven ongoing demand for our services: $140/hr. (and up) for commercial work during normal business hours, depending on travel distance, term of commitment, etc. We are also available on evenings, and weekends (for a reasonable premium), and can handle 3 a.m. emergencies as well (for a slightly more significant premium).