Alexander Patrakov

E-Mail: patrakov@gmail.com | Mobile: +7 953 0003379

Skype: aepatrakov | Telegram: aepatrakov | Wire: patrakov
Blog: https://patrakov.blogspot.com/
Interested in remote jobs only

10+ years of experience as a Linux system administrator and a software developer, 4 years as
a team lead. Proven record of working remotely. Open-source contributor. Proposed and
implemented both business-changing innovations and small but numerous “paper-cut”
improvements.

Goal
A mixed-skill position that combines Linux sysadmin and system-level developer responsibilities.
DevOps or project management jobs will also be considered.

Technologies and skills

• Linux (mostly Debian and Ubuntu) system administration and troubleshooting. Bash
scripting. Debian packaging. Will accept jobs related to other Linux distributions, too.
• Embedded Linux (worked both with Yocto and Buildroot).
• Python.
• Relational databases: MySQL and MariaDB.
• Networking and network troubleshooting (including iptables-based Linux firewalls, various
types of VPNs, IPv6, anycast and BGP).
• C (including network daemons).
• Teaching and mentoring others, reviewing code. Finding security issues.
• Docker & Kubernetes.
• Ansible.

Outdated skills (would need to relearn, won’t pass an interview now)

• Web development: PHP, Django, Flask
• Modern C++

Skills that interviewers asked for, but that I don’t have

• Linux kernel development
• Glib, GTK+, Qt
• Modern JavaScript
• A useful GitHub, GitLab or LinkedIn profile

Education
2004 – 2007: Candidate of Sciences (a Russian equivalent of PhD) in Solid State Physics.
1997 – 2004: Urals State University, Yekaterinburg, Russia. Master’s degree in Physics.

Third-party open source projects contributed to (on my free time)

2012-2018: PulseAudio: many small bugfixes, see
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/log/?qt=author&q=patrakov.
2014-2015: ALSA: bugfixes mostly related to “rewind” support (i.e. about replacing a chunk of
audio already sent to an audio device but not yet played). See https://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-
lib.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=patrakov.
2012: Wine: implemented a high-quality audio resampler. See

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 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14717.
2009: ImageMagick: fixed a number of memory-safety bugs and implemented reading of GPS
coordinates. See https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick6/blob/master/ChangeLog.
2003-2008: Linux From Scratch: was an editor of the “Linux From Scratch” and “Beyond Linux
From Scratch” books, and, since 2005, a co-maintainer of the Official Linux From Scratch LiveCD.

LWN articles
2019: “Linker limitations on 32-bit architectures”, https://lwn.net/Articles/797303/.
2019: “Improving .deb”, https://lwn.net/Articles/789449/.
2018: “Unexpected fallout from /usr merge in Debian”, https://lwn.net/Articles/773342/.

Other creative works

2015: A talk at Linux Audio Conference: “Timing issues in desktop audio playback infrastructure”.
Video: http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2015/video.php?id=8.
2012: A course on network programming for UNIX in the Urals State University. Lectures have
been recorded and published. See https://habr.com/ru/company/ideco/blog/138322/ (in Russian).
2011: A free DTS audio encoder (https://gitlab.com/patrakov/dcaenc, no longer developed).

Security issues discovered

CVE-2016-2781: Non-privileged session can escape to the parent session in chroot (coreutils)
CVE-2015-4171: An information leak vulnerability that affects certain IKEv2 StrongSwan setups
CVE-2014-3970: Crash in module-rtp-recv in PulseAudio via an empty UDP packet
CVE-2013-7324: Very high system audio volume can be set by a web page in Webkit-GTK

“Official” professional experience

October 2019 – December 2020: croit GmbH (remote)

croit GmbH (https://croit.io/) specializes in software defined storage and Ceph. Their flagship
product is a zero-touch provisioning system for Ceph that works by PXE-booting a live OS image.

Role: DevOps engineer (before July 2020). After that date, also took some customer support
duties and participated in the product development.

Main achievement: adapted croit solution to the needs of the customers who wanted to run it on a
hyper-converged infrastructure. Previously, this was impossible because each croit storage
node needed to be net-booted into the croit OS image, which would preclude it from running
anything else. The solution was to run the almost-unmodified croit OS image in an LXC container
instead of the bare metal.

May 2019 – October 2019: Freelancer (remote)

Short-term contracts, the successful ones are related to Embedded Linux projects and Linux server
troubleshooting.

One particularly interesting project was to help in the design of a high quality networked digital
audio player hardware. My achievement was to simplify the build scripts and the firmware itself, by
switching to Buildroot. This simplification has also reduced the boot time, thus improving user
experience.

February 2016 – January 2019: NobleProg Ltd (remote)

NobleProg Ltd (https://www.nobleprog.com/) is an international company that organizes and

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 provides corporate training courses on various IT topics.

Role: Developer, Sysadmin and Trainer as a full-time remote contractor.

Worked with: LXC, KVM, Ubuntu, cloud desktops, Apache, PHP, Python, Cherrypy (implemented a
REST API for managing VMs and containers for courses), business people that need explanations.

Main achievement: Redesigned the virtual desktop infrastructure used for providing courses.
Made it suitable for more types of courses. Now, participants need nothing except a web browser
to attend fully interactive training sessions. Courses no longer fail due to restrictions (like “No
software installation permitted”) imposed by the clients’ information security departments.

Presentations with extra information (one technical and one about the promoted business values)
are available on request.
March 2010 – November 2015: SkyDNS LLC / SafeDNS Inc. (Yekaterinburg, Russia)
SkyDNS LLC (https://www.skydns.ru/) is a Russian company that provides a DNS-based web filter
for parental control and similar purposes. Before 2011, it was a subdivision of Ideco Software.
SafeDNS Inc. (https://www.safedns.com/) is a US company operated by the same people for the
same purpose.

Roles: Leading developer of a web service (before 2011), Software architect (after 2011).
Managed a team of 3-5 people. Reviewed their code, tracked bugs, resolved technical disputes.

Worked with: C, networking, DNS, BGP, Python, PHP (for the website, until rewritten using
Django), MySQL, Debian (including packaging of all in-house software), developers, sysadmins,
data scientists.

Main achievements: Created all SkyDNS technical infrastructure from the ground up, except the
website. Wrote the filtering DNS server in C, and the scripts that manage the database of
categorized domains in Python. Proposed and implemented various new features, including
OpenVPN-based filter for mobile devices.

Technical presentation about this work is available on request.

September 2008 – March 2010: Yandex, LLC (Yekaterinburg, Russia)
Yandex (https://www.yandex.ru/) is the leading Russian web search engine.

Role: Software developer. Effectively, a remote job – the majority of the multimedia search team,
including the manager, were in Moscow.

Worked with: C++, in-house code base, FreeBSD, shell scripts, Makefiles, big data.

Main achievements: Fully automated creation of image and video search databases. Created
internal web-based tools that help managers answer questions like “why isn't this image or video
in the search results?”.

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