Meet GSS Red Hatter of the Week Gabriel Rocha!

Latest response

We are very excited to introduce this week's GSS Red Hatter Gabriel Rocha! Learn more about Gabriel in his own words below and stayed tuned throughout this week for more from Gabriel!

 

"Hello, my name is Gabriel Rocha. I was born in Brazil, grew up in New Hampshire and have lived in Switzerland and now Singapore since leaving home. I got involved with some network security folks in the mid-late 90s and have been working with Linux/networking ever since. I started in Silicon Valley before moving to Geneva, Switzerland to work at the United Nations. While there I worked at the United National Environment Program for 8 years, going to post-conflict countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan to set up IT systems. After moving to Singapore for my wife to pursue her PhD here, I joined Red Hat in early 2011 as a Technical Account Manager (TAM) focusing on large Financial Services Industry customers. The work involves providing custom support and coordinating fixes for problems for these customers. Within Red Hat, a TAM acts as a customer advocate, while at the same time being the face (and often the voice) of Red Hat to the customer, this creates some very interesting challenges as we juggle both roles. This is a demanding and extremely rewarding role which brings new adventures every day for us to explore. The job itself is rewarding, but there is a great joy that comes from doing meaningful work amongst others doing likewise in a healthy and enjoyable environment. Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my wife and baby son, practicing Aikido, scuba diving and playing computer games."

Responses

We were very excited to be able to connect with GSS Red Hatter of the Week Gabriel Rocha to ask him a few questions about his life here at Red Hat! Check out what we learned (and feel free to comment with your own questions for Gabriel)!

How do I go about changing an 'A record' with minimum service disruption?

Gabriel: "This is an interesting question and one which comes up on occasion. Within DNS there is a concept of a Time to Live (TTL) this defines how long client programs (including other DNS servers) should cache zone information. TTLs can be set zone-wide, or for a specific record. In the case of a host whose A record is set to change, one would set the TTL for the A record to a low number, say, 60 seconds. The trick here is that this needs to be done at least one zone-wide TTL unit before the move. So if your zone TTL is 14 days, you want to make this change more than 14 days before the intended change date. Say, 15 days before the zone TTL, you set your A record TTL to 60 seconds. Then on the day you
make your change, your 'outage' should be merely 60 seconds (assuming downstream DNS servers respect your TTL, but that is a different problem...)"

What is the best method for increasing performance on a host that does a lot of host lookups?

Gabriel: "This is a hot topic all around. The term we're looking for here is 'host caching.' Host caching is a process by which a program (a DNS caching daemon) stores results of DNS queries, such that the same query, run twice, would do one external lookup and one lookup from the cache. This considerably speeds up DNS response times for previously-cached records. Red Hat supports various solutions for DNS caching, but the most popular is to use dnsmasq to cache hosts."

How can DNS be used to track a machine whose IP address regularly changes?

Gabriel: "A good question. The magic term here is 'dynamic updates.' Dynamic updates is a process by which a host is given permission to update records in a DNS zone. You have probably heard of 'dyndns' which is a very popular provider of dynamic DNS services on the internet."

How can internal and external hosts receive different records for the same hostname?

Gabriel: "The thing to look for here is 'DNS views.' Views are a mechanism to provide different responses to DNS queries based on various rules, quite often ip addrs, or subnet related. You could have host test.example.com resolve to 10.0.0.1 for queries from the 10.0.0.0/24 network, or to 18.244.0.188 for queries from anywhere else, for example."

What does a normal day look like for you?

Gabriel: "This varies greatly but generally I wake up aronud 7am and start working around the same time, checking in on irc for any fires overnight from the other timezones, checking email, etc... The day is mostly dealing with issues as they arise and for the most part, I tend to work very long hours to keep up with the other regions we work with. I have customers whose primary base is Europe, or North America, so I end up staying up quite late most nights to field conference calls, or just discuss with colleagues in other regions."

What steps do you go through to solve an issue for a customer?

Gabriel: "This too, tends to vary, so many different kinds of issues. Generally, the 'holy grail' for supporting customer issues is being able to reproduce the issue yourself. I try to distill customer issues down into their basic components so we can tackle them one at a time, isolating bits here and there, until we can say for sure where a problem is. Divide and conquer, as it were, in a support context."

Do you have a favorite interaction with a customer?

Gabriel: "Certainly! One of my European customers is very technical and knowledgeable. It is always a pleasure to work with people who try very hard to resolve a problem before turning to you. This in turn creates some expectation, but due to the nature of the job, we are never alone and the team always works together, so things work out very well for us and everyone is happy."

How did you first get started with Linux?

Gabriel: "This is tricky... Linux I started playing with at around the age of 15ish. But the real start was my mum taking a UNIX class at a local community college when I was 14ish and I ended up learning more from her class than she did!"

What is it like working in the Red Hat Singapore office?

Gabriel: "The Singapore office is fantastic. We have some amazing people, from all parts of the world. It is an interesting dynamic here, because this is mostly a Sales/Finance office, with only two people in the support department here, myself and a colleage who is a Support Relationship Manager. We end up involved in a lot more high-profile issues than we would otherwise, as we are seen as embassadors for our department here. Also, Singapore being how it is, there is some amazing (and cheap) food nearby the office. Nothing like a nice portion of chiken rice for lunch!"

 

Thank you Gabriel for answering some of our questions! It is always great to learn more about our amazing GSS'ers! And remember, if you have more questions for Gabriel please leave them in the comments!

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