MONIC, the Internet domain registry for Macau was originally setup and operated by the University of Macau in 1992.  The government of Macau, wanting to expand development of services decided to move the operations out to a separate company.  An RFP was issued for interested parties to undertake this work.  I had been working with a colleague on a different project with HNET (Macau) who had been tracking the government RFP’s.  We decided to work together on putting together a group to field what was to become the winning proposal and then later a new joint venture company to actually run the registry.

Operation for MONIC was transferred to HNET Asia in March 2011.  I was part of the team that put together the proposal to the government and then after being awarded the contract built the two small data centers.  The first was a small computer room with proper air and power conditioning co-located with the MONIC office.   A single rack of computers, all running CentOS Linux powered this center.   A second redundant rack was setup at the CTM data center across town.  Was responsible for all hardware acceptance, build, installation, operating system installation and setup, together with basic networking and all electronic mail and directory services.  Also built and configured the office IP-PABX system, an Asterisk based phone system connected to standard Cisco SCCP phones and CTM phone lines through Cisco ATAs.  Also built and deployed the initial internal CRM system and internal web portal for the company (Drupal based).  The DNS and registry functions were handled by the engineers with dotAsia, one of the JV partners.  Worked with MONIC on a retainer basis to assist in the operation of the MONIC network as needed for the next few years.