SysAdmin Adventures

I’m a UK-based Systems Administrator, Slackware user and F/OSS contributor.

At work, I am the only person in IT for a medium-sized company. While this makes for a stressful life, it also gives me a lot of freedom to run the network exactly how I want it to be run with no interference from anyone else. My management is only concerned that everything works, and so long as everything is working, I am free to do my job my own way.

What this means in practice is that, since taking over at the company, almost the entirety of the core network has been migrated to Slackware. I inherited a lot of Sun equipment and a lot of Red Hat based operating systems. The Sun equipment had no redundancy and expensive support contracts instead, so I’ve replaced (or nearly finished replacing) it all with redundant kit running Slackware. Some of the Red Hat based bits have had to stay because of binary-vendor compatibility, but I’ve reduced it to the minimum.

As for the rest of the network, it lives off of Windows XP (damn users!) on a Win2003 domain that I hope will eventually become Samba4, but at least for now I have a central user directory that provides an LDAP interface for all the F/OSS software I run; which is just about everything. My general motto is: “If it can be done for free, do it for free”. The finance director seems to like this philosophy, and I like it because I have permission to release any work I do on F/OSS projects back to the community. So everyone wins.

At home I run my domain off my own equipment, from DNS & e-mail to this blog, so it’s effectively a little extension of my work-life.

More often than not I can be found on IRC:

• irc.freenode.net
  • ##slackware
  • #slackbuilds
  • #sbopkg
  • #lopsa
• irc.perl.org
  • #rt

Having said that, I also spend a lot of time not on-line as I do what I can to have a life outside of technology. I live with my gorgeous fiancée whom I’ve been with for more than 5 years and our two lovely cats. We live in a gorgeous part of central England half way between my work and her University at which she has recently enrolled as a mature-student.

That’s enough about me, I think.