CoreMind's Capabilities
More coming soon. In the mean time please contact us if you have any queries about our specific capabilities.
General Capabilities
- IT Strategy, Direction & Consulting
- IT Management & Project Management
- Systems Engineering
- Systems Integration
- Software Development (all components)
- "Going deep" on problems
- Linux, linux, linux!
- Standard Operating Environments - specifically Windows XP workstations against a Samba domain
- High quality systems engineering
- "Cheeky solutions"
- Automation
Platform Capabilities
- Linux
- Expert: Gentoo
- Highly Experienced: Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat
- Some deep knowledge: FreeBSD, OS X (Darwin),
- Will hack our way around the others, but unless there's a really good reason to keep it we'd much prefer to migrate to a platform we can support well (i.e. Gentoo)
- Windows clients
- Expert: Windows XP
- Highly Experienced: Windows 7
- Capable: Windows Vista, Windows Mobile
- Out-dated knowledge now: Windows 2000, ME, 98, 95, 3.11, DOS
- Windows servers
- Expert: Windows Server 2003 (including SBS)
- Experienced: Windows Server 2008
- Out-dated knowledge now: Windows Server 2000, NT Server
- Will hack our way around the others, but unless there's a really good reason to keep it we'd much prefer to migrate to a platform we can support well (i.e. transition to Linux, leave in place and isolated (and potentially virtualised) or migrate to 2008
- Mac OS clients
- Experienced: Mac OS X.4 upwards
- Familiar: Mac OS X < Tiger
- Out-dated knowledge now: Mac OS 9, 8.1, 7.6.1, 7.1, 6.0.7, ... System 3
- N.B. We do not consider ourselves particularly "expert" in OS X clients but do support the environment just fine for a number of smaller clients. If you are after high quality managed IT support for a Mac OS X platform, I would strongly suggest you reconsider your strategy (and move to either Windows or Linux). Our advice is Mac OS X is suitable for small, largely unmanaged environments.
- Mac OS servers
- N.B. We do not implement OS X servers but have been known to troubleshoot them from time to time. When we do so we rely on our general IT skills and knowledge of Mac OS X and Linux. We do not claim to be OS X server specialists (nor do we want to as this is in our experience both a moving target and a buggy platform)
Specific Linux Capabilities
We specialise in Gentoo Linux, but are familiar with other distributions as well. The following are our current areas of high technical proficiency which we deal with on a daily basis. We have vast skills in other areas, but the below can be considered our butter zone and standard implementation toolkit:
- Core Services
- Kernel customisation
- Installation & Migration between various hardware & virtual platforms
- grub
- portage (configuration, updates, init scripts, custom ebuilds)
- Custom build & maintenance scripts
- PAM
- Disk Management
- Software RAID (md)
- LVM
- SMART parameter checking integrated with nagios
- Linux Networking
- IP Routing
- iptables
- + QOS
- OpenVPN (end user and point to point)
- BIND
- OpenLDAP (N.B. out-dated knowledge as we generally try to avoid this complexity)
- openSSL
- squid
- sshd
- Backup
- rdiff-backup
- rsnapshot
- tar, rsync (for manual & remote backups & migrations)
- Mail Server
- Exim
- Courier (IMAP)
- Procmail
- Spamassassin
- ClamAV
- Roundcube (webmail)
- Former deep experiences with postfix and sendmail & cyrus, but we now standardise on the above
- Database Server
- MySQL (expert)
- PostgreSQL (experienced)
- Application Hosting
- LAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP)
- RubyOnRails custom hosting (primarily using passenger)
- Source code hosting, Deployment & Project Management (primarily git + capistrano + trac)
- Monitoring
- Nagios distributed monitoring
- Experience with other tools, but we have spent a lot of effort customising & deploying nagios
- Windows Networking
- Samba (with NT4 domains)
- CUPS (with samba and domain integration)
- Asterisk
- Asterisk 1.4, 1.6, 1.8
- Full asterisk systems only, no trixbox etc.
- Custom dialplans (we write by hand)
- VoIP trunking via IAX2 & SIP (including latency optimisations)
- Analogue trunking via chan_dahdi (formerly zaptel)
- Deployment & customisation of Open Source Web Applications
- RequestTracker
- SugarCRM
- PHPList
- Hosting & Customisation of the above
- Misc
- Multi internet routing
- Link aggregation
- Kernel and module debugging
- Filesystem & RAID recovery
- Security - consideration at all layers and through all services
Development Platform Capabilities
- RubyOnRails
- Our primary development platform for robust, agile-developed scalable applications
- Scaffolding
- git (formerly subversion & cvs)
- capistrano
- passenger (formerly mongrel)
- apache
- trac (with customisations)
- whiteboards!!!
- Microsoft Access
- Standalone (JET) applications
- MySQL-backed (via ODBC) applications
- N.B. We use Microsoft Access for micro-scale application development. The SQL backing combined with sensible long-term application & database design (which doesn't cost you that much if you do it up-front) can result in exceptional price/performance applications that are expandable into the future. That's not to say the original Access app will cope - it won't (realistically). But it may still form a part of the eventual solution whilst industrial languages like RubyOnRails gradually take over and/or augment Access functionality. e.g. You could have a robust RubyOnRails web front end for clients, with an Access application for reporting & data entry. This can help considerably with minimising costs (at the expense of having to tightly constrain functionality and say no to anything that is too hard/fiddly in Access)