I’m James Lawrie, a Linux Consultant with almost a decade of experience managing and supporting Linux servers. I’ve previously worked for the well-known UK hosting companies UKFast...Read moreI’m James Lawrie, a Linux Consultant with almost a decade of experience managing and supporting Linux servers. I’ve previously worked for the well-known UK hosting companies UKFast and Bytemark and now I’m operating on a freelance basis. See my reviews and website at https://silvermouse.net/ or https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameslawrie/
I’m always interested in taking on new clients, whether it be for a one-off project or regular work. If you have something which you feel I may be interested in, feel free to contact me.
Linux Server Management and Maintenance
Many of my clients have some Linux knowledge but prefer to focus on the part of their business that they love, and have me on hand for resolving everyday problems such as service problems, hack attempts, advice on upgrading and fixing email issues.
I have extensive experience in the following areas:
Web technologies such as Apache, Nginx, Varnish and HAProxy.
Mail services including Postfix, Exim, and Dovecot and Courier, and spam filtering via SpamAssassin.
Backup strategies Intelligent policies for incremental and offsite backups that are easy to restore from.
Configuration management with Ansible, Puppet, and CFEngine.
Virtualisation with KVM, libvirt, and Vagrant.
Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
Linux Server Security, including PCI DSS
I’m regularly asked to clean up hacked servers and discover the intrusion source.
The majority of attacks tend to be through website exploits, and having cleaned up tens of machines over the years I know most of the tricks used by hackers. I can clean up the attack, perform a security audit of the server, and advise on ways to stop it happening again.
I’m also experienced remedying any problems found in a PCI/DSS scan, and can also advise when a scan is producing false positives.
Website and Server Performance Tuning
Google is now factoring speed into search result rankings, and so the need for a quick site has never been greater.
I specialise in back-end performance and have extensive experience with webserver load balancing, caching with Varnish and HAProxy, and MySQL scaling. Over the years I’ve helped many large and medium sized companies to solve their scaling issues, allowing them to grow beyond a single server setup to a setup providing reliability, redundancy, and increased performance.
MySQL Support and Consultancy
One of my biggest interests is MySQL performance and scalability. Often MySQL is the bottleneck in web applications and I specialise in optimizing MySQL’s configuration. I can advise on and build database setups over multiple servers if necessary.