My Work
Current
I work in the School of
Computing at the National University
of Singapore as a Senior Systems Engineer in the network team. My job has to do
with everything there is about running a network in SOC. That
includes the network infrastructure (planning, implementing, etc), network
services (DNS, DHCP, etc), access facilities (dialup, VPN, etc), and
security (firewall, intrusion detection, etc). There are other stuffs that
I take care of too (Alumni Network
Services, etc).
There are just two engineers in the network group, me and my colleague Tsjin Budiman. Between us, we run the SOC network which comprises 12 class C subnets across three buildings with over 2400 hosts (over 3000 users). Our network is a mixture of Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, FDDI, ATM and 802.11 wireless LAN. The operational aspects of our work keep us pretty busy because we have very challenging users who are continually upsetting the peace and harmony of our networks.
We do develop some home-grown tools of our own to assist us in network managemenet and administration. We also actively evaluate and experiment with "new toys" (both hardware and software) for possible deployment.
There are also some on-the-side projects that I've been involved in. These primarily centre around the use Linux in areas of high-availability clustering and cluster computing.
I also supervise a few student projects in the areas of wireless networking, network monitoring and performance measurements.
Past
Previously, I was a Research Officer in the
Centre for Internet Research (CIR).
CIR is, incidentally, also a part of the School of Computing. My primary work
is in the Singapore Advanced Research
and Education Network (SingAREN) project. SingAREN is a virtual
organisation driven by Kent Ridge
Digital Labs, the Centre for Internet Research (that's where I come
in), and the Network Technology Research Centre at the
Nanyang Technological University.
SingAREN operates an advanced high speed network between tertiary
institutions and research centres/institutes in Singapore, and also provides
links to counterpart networks in the United States, Canada, Japan and Korea.
My job has been to support research users, facilitate and also to undertake
various collaborative projects in areas of tele-education, digital libraries
and distributed databases.
At CIR, among other things, I drive a distance education project where we make use of live synchronous video-conferencing to deliver a real course attended by postgraduate students. This is jointly run with Stanford University and the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden).
While working in CIR/SingAREN, I had two offices: one at AOS Building where SingAREN's office is located, and another at Block S17 in the School of Computing where CIR is located. I tend to shuttle between these locations quite often.
Just a quick history lesson: The Centre for Internet Research was previously
(before April 1998) known as the Internet Research and Development Unit (IRDU)
which was hosted by the Computer Centre. This is where I started my first
full-time job back in July 1997. IRDU is the successor to Technet when the
latter was sold off from NUS to become Pacific Internet. Technet is the unit
responsible for bringing Internet into Singapore in the early 1990s. CIR
was originally hosted by the Department of Information Systems and Computer
Science which, since July 1998, became the School of Computing.
