Latest revision as of 09:47, 10 September 2008

Okay, so I'm not really a doctor...

[edit] About

I started out on a Commodore 16 back when I was four and progressed through various computing platforms, most notably Windows and then Linux, before discovering FreeBSD several years ago. Since then I have had a long-term love affair with this operating system!

I live in the offshore finance centre of Guernsey, part of the Channel Islands which sit between the mainlands of UK and France, and work within the IT department of a fiduciary (trust / finance industry) company.

[edit] Knowledge

I have been privileged through my career to have used many different computing platforms from the humble BBC Micro to large-scale IBM AS/400s. After discovering FreeBSD I became proficient at deploying, implementing and maintaining it in both personal and corporate environments.

At home it has been used to host my web and email server over an ADSL connection and as a Samba file server to store music and movies.

In the office it is used to monitor network traffic with MRTG, host an internal Wikipedia for application development documentation, allow marketing to mass-mail intermediaries using qmail and host SecureFTP file distribution on-line. Recently a Subversion server was requested by the development team and was installed within moments from the fantastic ports system.

[edit] Contact

I look forward to chatting with any like-minded FreeBSD users out there. I can be contacted on:

• ICQ: 59-397-985 or;
• MSN: glynb at hotmail dot co dot uk (hotmail used to be a FreeBSD house once!)

Of course, I use those accounts through KDE Kopete on a laptop running PC-BSD!

[edit] Up Time

Just to prove the reliability of FreeBSD as a server operating system, here's my uptime:

%uptime
 3:23PM  up 386 days, 16:01, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

...also proves that the electricity supply in Guernsey is extremely reliable as that server is not on a UPS either!

It's just a shame that I have to power it off in order move my servers into a new location within the house :'-( *sniff*

Update (2008-09-10) I decided not to power it off but the dust got to the machine and it died from over heating. So it managed just over the 400 days before requiring a good blow-out. In other news, I now have a Sun Microsystems Ultra 5 to play with and have managed to get FreeBSD 7.0 for Sparc running. Now... what to use it for???