Hello, and Introductions

[Jayson Rowe]

Good Evening,
I sent an e-mail yesterday after reading an article in the Fedora
Newsletter which made me realize that this may be an area where I can
help the Fedora project and gain some additional experience. At
Kevin's (nirik) invitation, I joined the IRC meeting today. So, here
is a formal introduction e-mail:

Name: Jayson Rowe
IRC Handle: jayson_r
Twitter: jayson_r
Skills: I've been using Linux since Red Hat 6.1. I used Red Hat/Fedora
exclusively until right before FC3 came out, and I got into Slackware,
which I ran until Ubuntu came out (I think I switched around 5.10) - I
ran Kubuntu until KDE 4.0 came out, and I distro-hopped around a bunch
of GNOME distro's (including Fedora and Ubuntu for a while) until I
came back "home" to Fedora starting around Fedora 7 (right before 8
came out). I still use Ubuntu some - have some Ubuntu boxes at work,
but I've come to really prefer the Red Hat way of doing things, and I
definatly prefer having Fedora on my personal workstation. We also
have some CentOS boxes at work as well. I am running Fedora 15 w/
GNOME 3 at the moment.
I am a what my company calls a senior "Netwok Administrator", but in
the rest of the world's terms, I'm really more of a Systems
Administrator, since I mostly take care of our servers. and I'm also
our company's Telecom Admin, managing our Avaya S8730 switch (which
runs a Red Hat kernel, 2.6.18, so based on RHEL5.x), and
administration on our 150 seat Call Center. When I moved up from a PC
Technician, we were a 100% Windows shop, but I have slowly started
running Linux where I can (and where it makes sense). We also use Xen
for virtualization, but we use the "pre-packaged" Citrix XenServer (as
well as other Citrix products such as XenApp and XenDesktop, which
have nothing to do with Xen, other than the App boxes are running on
Xen hosts).

My company is ACS Technologies (http://www.acstechnologies.com) and we
are based in Florence, SC and create software used by Churches,
Schools and other Non-profit organizations. We recently purchased a
new company based out of Seattle called "The City"
(http://www.onthecity.org/) which much to *my* delight is a decidedly
non-MS shop - their stuff is written in Ruby, and runs on Linux
(Ubuntu and CentOS) servers.
The Linux boxes we have at ACS are mostly SVN, Git (since we acquired
The City), Confluence, Jira, Postfix relay servers and DNS servers.
The Citrix XenServer hosts really run CentOS behind the scenes as
well. I know Windows server admin stuff like the back of my hand, and
especially since we acquired The City, I need/want to learn more Linux
server admin skills. Up to this point, besides the servers I
mentioned, most of my Linux skills have centered around running my own
boxes at home. The City has a Linux Git server out in Seattle, which I
inherited, so learning Git admin would be a huge benefit to me, as
well as the Ruby stack, and LAMP stack (their www site is running on
Apache/CentOS). I've always been the "this isn't running Windows, give
it to Jayson" guy at work, so I really want to take this opportunity
to follow my passion at work. I'm also the lone Mac user in my IT
department, having a MacBook on my desk along w/ a desktop running
Fedora (although I have a XenDesktop virtual running Win7 for my
Windows only apps).

I can devote at least a couple of hours in the evening from 9-11
(eastern) most days, and I can do some "side work" for Fedora from my
regular job - my bosses see this as an opportunity to learn and grow,
so I have their blessings, as long as it doesn't get in the way of my
work.

There may be a lot for me to learn, but I'm willing to jump in and
learn, and I'd love being an apprentice with you guys, and hopefully
join the team officially one day. I have bookmarked the Active Tickets
page (https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/report/1) and
will look through and see if there is anything I can help with, and I
look forward to hearing more from you all.

Thanks for the opportunity to learn, and help!
Jayson
(sorry for rambling)