If there is such a thing as this “Linux Guru” I keep hearing about from people, I’m probably one of them.
I’ve been working with Linux since 1994 when I started out with SlackWare in High School. I was even a junior administrator during the summers. During 1996/1997 I became interested in RedHat Linux as they had a simpler installation process and seemed to be more of a production grade distribution.
Lucky for me, my hunch turned out to be right. I have more experience with RedHat Linux and it’s derivatives than most RedHat Certified Engineers.
After I left high school, I hosted a few Linux servers out of my parents’ basement on my cable modem for several years. I hosted web sites, email and even my own company site for a year or so. Eventually, when my company started to take off, I negotiated some space in someone’s rack at a local Tier II datacenter and migrated all my infrastructure there.
In 2005 the owner of my then-client had a heart attack, which convinced him that it was time to finally retire. I negotiated my first true colocation on my own two feet. With the help of some employees and friends, I moved my growing infrastructure of around a dozen servers to a Tier III datacenter in Downtown Denver, Colorado hosted by Level(3) and began preparations with a partner company to build out a Tier III facility of our own inside the same building.
In 2011, after getting fed up with the lack of sleep associated with worrying about hardware outages, I began to virtualize my infrastructure. The Linux servers were the first as I had the most experience with them. By fall, I had rebuilt my entire Linux infrastructure on a VMWare platform hosted by another partner company. That private Cloud has grown to a pretty decent size, and was purchased by my then full-time employer, and I managed every byte of it.
Until the summer of 2015, I managed a series of Linux Systems and Virtualization Architecture hosted at a prominent Tier IV data center located north of the RiNo district in Denver’s Industrial Center. The professional portion of my Linux infrastructure has now been migrated to the Google Cloud Engine platform.
Some of my Linux specific dealings:
| Apache/nginx | Bind DNS | Sendmail/procmail | SpamAssassin |
| iptables/firewalld | BASH/KSH/SH/ZSH | mySQL | PostgreSQL |
| vsftpd | proftpd | OpenSSH | Custom Kernels |
| Kernel Modules | ZFS/ext4 | NFS/SABMA |