“I worked with Terrance [Houlahan] during the Linux Systems Administration & Postfix Application training he conducted for my team in Pune, India. Training was performance oriented where skills were taught, then demonstrated and finally practiced on training RedHat Linux VMs. By the end of the 3 month training I felt both very competent and confident managing our Linux systems. Sessions were 2 hours in length 3 days a week.

Terrence’s training materials were excellent! His PowerPoint training decks included annotated screen grabs of all discussion examples and training exercises to illustrate key learning points. He even created a Postfix mailserver with SASL authentication that was routing mail for multiple domains to teach us not only how to modify, but also for practice troubleshooting. Terrence would break the server with increasingly complex faults and we would take turns identifying and resolving them. We would discuss the effectiveness of the staff member’s troubleshooting approach as a group afterwards.

As training progressed, Terrance incorporated and reinforced earlier key skills and concepts with newer skills. After training, he mentored us during handover of the mail systems from the vendor previously managing them. I am looking forward to work with Terrance in future as well.” 

– Sumathy Angelin, Syngenta Technical Staff, Pune India (2018)

“I worked with Terrence [Houlahan] within the Business Solutions and Design group of Racingpost. I am the Technical Solutions Architect, Terrence was the Linux Architect. I found Terrence to be not only highly skilled in the Linux area but also very knowledgeable within the entire networking sphere as well. Terrence fitted in well within the team, taking care of many ongoing projects as well as occasionally providing 3rd Line support to internal IT staff outside our group. 

I also found that he is an outstanding technical trainer, creating in-depth technical courses (including excellent materials) and he personally trained a large number of our internal IT staff on areas as diverse as Git administration for developers and support staff to very specific detailed courses on character encoding (UTF encoding) for understanding data transfers between incompatible systems. I can personally recommend Terrence to any business who needs a leader with these skills.” 

– Stephan Gorton, Technical Solutions Architect, Racing Post (2017)

Before sending a  Polio EOC (“Emergency Operations Center”)  Tech out to their assignments, I’d given them practical training in the Kano EOC with my outstanding colleague Mukhtar. I’d go through all the key skills they needed to succeed in their role, and we’d given the trainee practical configuration & troubleshooting practice in the Kano EOC.  A large part of the training was of course networking, working with a 1U local server and printers.

Mukhtar and I would introduce faults into the network and observe how they worked to isolate the cause of the fault. We would increase the complexity of the faults, and introduce multiple faults for the trainee to work through. By the time we were through, they had a high level of self-confidence they could succeed and we had too had confidence they would succeed. The young lady in this picture below was not hired because of gender quotas: she was hired because she was by far the sharpest candidate out of a fairly large field. She earned her appointment; nothing was given to her based on gender. Although she wasn’t a network guru, she was previously a software developer and so had substantial IT experience and possessed excellent analytical & logical skills.

And while I was training the EOC trainees with Mukhtar, I was training him to be a trainer to ultimately carry on after I returned to the UK.