User since: Dec 05, 2007 at 09:11 UTC (18 years ago)
Last here: Dec 13, 2007 at 11:29 UTC (18 years ago)
Experience: 3
Level:Initiate (1)
Writeups: 2
Location:www.foo-unix.org
User's localtime: Dec 17, 2025 at 19:21 UTC
Scratchpad: None.
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Hi,

I'm a systems administrator responsible for a heterogeneous network comprised of several SunOS/Solaris machines (both SPARC && x86), several FreeBSD and OpenBSD machines, a couple of Linux boxen, several Windows machines and one iMac (and that's just at home, to my wife's horror. She often complains "We've got more computers than kids."). I have been building and repairing computers and installing various Operating Systems for more years than I care to recall. Apart from the iMac, my laptop and SPARCs, I built all of the machines on my network. I have been a loose-knit member of 2600 for many years (whitehat).

I am fully conversant with the installation and administration of BIND (DNS servers), Sendmail, imap and pop3 servers, nfs, samba, http and dhcp servers. I know pf back to front and write my own pf.conf files from scratch. I enjoy using tcpdump and nmap. I read the RFC's for pleasure and W. Richard Stevens is my favourite author.

I have been programming in one language or another since 1978 when I started programming in BASIC. Shortly after, I began programming in Machine Code on Z80 based machines. Not a day has gone by since '78 that I haven't used a computer (literally, every day and sometimes all day and often programming into the early hours of the morning). I can program in many languages but I prefer to program in C/C++. I enjoy shell s‎crip‎ting and like creating nifty regexes to solve complex problems. I love TCP/IP and I especially enjoy writing networking apps for Solaris and FreeBSD using the Berkeley Sockets API in C. I'd like to refine my network programming skills in Perl but all in due time. The most obscure language I can program in is LISP. As far as Windows goes, I do enjoy VB, VBs‎crip‎t and Visual C++. I find them fun and relaxing.

All this, I've done by reading and doing. I'm self-taught. I've never done a course or had any formal training. I'm a natural but unfortunately, I'm not actually working in IT. I lack self-confidence and am very humble (as you can tell :) offline. Really, I am.