6:54 a.m.
On Wed, 2014-11-26 at 20:13 -0600, Dan Mossor wrote:
Good day fellow Server enthusiasts!
I am hereby announcing my second candidacy for the Server Working Group.
For those that didn't receive (or don't recall) the first self-intro I
did last April, here's a little background. I am a Systems Engineer
which, translated, means I make heterogeneous - and sometimes
"incompatible" - systems work together. I have been in IT since I was a
child, and my service in the United States Navy gave me the training and
experience I needed to make a pretty good career out of it. I've
returned to University to finally get a degree - I don't currently have
one and have reached the highest position I can without it.
I have been maintaining servers of one form or fashion since 1993. My
first systems were HPUX and Sun Solaris 2.0. I set up my first Red Hat
server in 1998 to serve as the DNS, web, ftp and file server for the
Commander, US Navy Central Command. While at that station, I was
appointed the Information Systems Security Officer, and was eventually
recognized as having the most secure network in Central Command in 2000.
I have maintained RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Solaris, BSD and
Windows servers in one flavor or another since 2003, and have been
slowly transitioning my current systems to a virtualized infrastructure
built on CentOS 7 and Openstack Juno. As part of that transition, I have
moved our file server from Windows to a Fedora 21 server with Samba,
pulling the data from a storage server via iSCSI. I've also deployed a
F21 server to fill the role as a local repository (with most of the
aforementioned operating systems hosted), and another server as our
first central identification and authorization using FreeIPA. I have
other instances in production serving double duty as the DNS server
(integrated with the FreeIPA server) and eJabberd for a local network IM
service.
On a separate network, I am running a mixed CentOS, Fedora and Windows
Active Directory environment for a development team. Within this closed
network, I run DNS, Apache, Redmine (formerly trac), eJabberd (formerly
Openfire), git (formerly svn), and multiple CentOS machines doing
nothing but virtual hosting for test instances built on KVM/QEMU. The
Windows portion of the network serves the sole duty of authentication
and identification, but I am using the Windows Services for Uniz to
provide some interoperability for that function.I am advocating moving
away from Windows based development environments to Fedora, so I can
eventually call my network a pure Linux network.
In regards to the Fedora community as a whole, I am a member of the QA
team, and dedicate most of my testing time to the Server and KDE
products (yes, I know KDE isn't a product....yet). I talk up Fedora and
it's abilities at any given opportunity, and have convinced more than a
few folks to switch to Fedora from Ubuntu. I like what the Server
product has become, and want to see it supplant Ubuntu as the
"reference" server for multiple projects (namely Openstack, among many).
I do what I can in my limited role to make this happen.
In short, I am a maintainer of servers, and use them in my daily duties
at my day job; I am an end-user of the product. My weakness in the
Fedora community, however, is that I am not a developer. It's not what I
do, I don't want to do it. I make the systems available for the
developers to do their job. To that end, I am very good at what I do.
I feel that I would bring insight and ideas to the WG as an end user of
the product - a voice that needs to be heard by any development project.
It wouldn't do very good to build a product that isn't wanted, or worse,
even needed.
Thank you for the reintroduction, Dan. You've been a valued member of
the Fedora Server SIG for several months now and your efforts have been
much appreciated. I want to say thank you for all you have done to help
us get Fedora 21 Server in shape and I hope that you will continue in
the future.