Awards

Rafael Guimaraes

I have been working with Red Hat® solutions for several years. However, since I joined Petrobras—the largest oil company in Brasil and one of the largest in the world—my Red Hat skills have grown and made a big difference to the company.

Here at Petrobras, we have a large Linux® environment based on Red Hat products. I have the pleasure to help manage and contribute to the environment with new solutions. Since I have improved my knowledge about Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to acquire my official certifications—Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT), Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE®), and JBoss Certified Application Administrator Certificate—my contribution to Petrobras has also improved.

I have conducted several projects that required my RHCE skills. These projects were responsible for enhancing our IT services. I was able to merge this knowledge with my PHP programming skills and developed a kickstart-based installation for our desktops that can be customized depending on specific departmental needs. These projects have significantly reduced the time spent on installing new Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Another important project that combined my RHCE skills with some PHP programming was the development of an environment that provides collaborative, remote 3-D Red Hat Enterprise Linux sessions. The developed solution allowed users (engineers, geologists, etc.) to remotely collaborate with each other on oil prospect projects all over the country. Moreover, it allowed users with low-end computers to have access to high-end, 3-D graphical processing power. The solution was based on VirtualGL and TurboVNC. Several issues related to kerberos user authentication, data security (ssh, SELinux etc), and lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) integration had to be taken into account. At that point, my knowledge about Red Hat products was crucial. This specific project was important internally, and is currently being deployed all over the country, improving the workflow of engineers and geologists and, consequently, helping our core business.

Besides that, I have also been involved with several other projects that demanded my knowledge of Red Hat products. I was able to make good use of SELinux on our machines, instead of simply disabling it, as we used to do before. We have deployed a Red Hat JBoss Middleware infrastructure for supporting really important applications for monitoring oil production. I was also able to use my JBoss Certified Application Administrator skills in order to create a secure, optimized, and efficient Red Hat JBoss Middleware installation.

For the above reasons, and due to other contributions to Petrobras that my Red Hat certifications made possible, I intend to keep improving my skills and being able to use everything I learn on our daily activities.