Introduction, More or Less...

I'm a System Administrator by "trade."  I'm a generalist--I administer primarily Windows machines, but I also have responsibility over a couple AIX boxes, a slowly growing contingent of Linux boxes, some HP PoE switches, a bunch of Cisco gear, a Microsoft Exchange 2010 environment utilizing a Database Availability Group (DAG) and fail-over clustering, and a VMware environment consisting of 10 ESX servers, one ESXi server, and roughly 50 virtual machines.  I'm also responsible for the backup operations, using a few different products that don't always play nice with each other.  In many ways, my peers and co-workers consider me to be a resident expert, which is a role I'm not always comfortable with.

I learned Linux by using it at home starting in 2001, back in the days when 128 MB RAM was sufficient for a workstation, X11 was provided by XFree86 3.3.6, and GNOME 1.2.x was "current."  I started with what was then called LinuxMandrake 7.2.  I eventually upgraded to Mandrake Linux 8.1, tried RedHat 8, resided on Fedora Core for a while, experimented with Ubuntu long enough to discover I hated it with a passion (around 2006), then finally settled on Debian.

I've used what I learned on Linux to spread out into other UNIX flavors.  I've briefly messed with IRIX and HP-UX, and I worked on an NCR MP-RAS system for several years.  At one point, per my boss' request, I wrote a custom backup solution for the MP-RAS system in Bourne Shell that used cpio, OpenSSL, and OpenSSH to get the same backup written to an encrypted tape and securely copied to a remote MP-RAS system as a disaster recovery option.  I even included multiple verification of each backup with md5sum, sha1sum, and sha256sum (long story), followed by a test extract into a temporary destination on the remote system.

I learned Active Directory design and administration at a local community college, on Windows 2000--I just finished the Windows 2000 courses a month or two after Windows Server 2003 was released.  I never pursued certification, because I didn't expect that I would need it and I was too cheap to pay for all the exams.  I've kept current via experimentation with evaluation editions and sometimes at-work test environments.  I'm incredibly happy that although Microsoft has added a ton of new features and changed a bunch of UI elements they have chosen to keep Active Directory in a state where all of the basic concepts I learned 10 years ago still apply.

I am a developer on the open-source IM client Pidgin.  I don't do a whole lot over there anymore, but I've worked on a few areas I thought were worthwhile.  I once rewrote huge chunks of the man page (you Linux and UNIX guys out there are probably nodding in approval now), and I also at one point reworked the preferences window to fit in the ridiculously tiny screens on netbooks, amazingly without slashing any options in the process.

As part of my administration job, I occasionally write scripts to do work for me.  I'll write in whatever language I feel I can get the right results in the most quickly.  Sometimes that's a plain old .bat file (ugh), VBScript (ugh, again!), occasionally good old Bourne shell, and more frequently now Python.

I started this blog primarily because I wanted to be able to post administration-related ramblings without having to remember to properly apply labels to my other blog to avoid being picked up in Pidgin's news feed.  I'm hoping someone finds this stuff useful.