Rich Pollei - Debian 7: System Administration Best Practices

Rich Pinkall Pollei 's over 40 year interest in computer hardware and software began in high school with Ohio Scientific's release of the first kit-built computers in the early 1970s. Later, he progressed to other systems, learning all he could of both the underlying hardware and software architectures, eventually working as a consulting programmer on some of the early time-sharing systems, first at the college he attended, and later when he worked as a Psychiatric Social Worker for the Tri-County Human Services Center in Reedsburg, Wisconsin.

Eventually, he decided to move into Information Technology as a permanent profession. He started as the Assistant Manager of Data Entry for Wisconsin Dairy Herd Improvement Cooperative at a time when such departments were common. He stayed with that company in various positions involving systems programming and analysis, and continued to learn. He was an official Beta Tester for Windows 3.0. Later, he set up the company's first Internet e-mail system using a discarded computer and modem, and the free version of Red Hat Linux. Total cost, not counting the dial-up account and his time, was $0, demonstrating that: "We who have done so much with so little for so long are now prepared to do absolutely anything with nothing".

Eventually, Wisconsin DHIA became AgSource Cooperative Services, which soon combined with other dairy industry-related cooperatives under a holding cooperative known as Cooperative Resources International (CRI). Rich continued to study and learn as computers and networking grew to greater importance in both our personal and business lives. For a number of years, he served as an official on the Unite Conference Planning committee (Unite is an independent, Unisys User Group).

Today, his official position is as a Security Analyst and Systems Engineer in the Infrastructure department of Information Technology for CRI, and he is approaching his 35th year with the company (or its predecessors). As such, he administers a number of Debian Linux servers, manages the official Internet infrastructure (he has one of the oldest individual handles still in use by an original registrant at ARIN), and consults on hardware issues, software internals, networking problems, and system and network security. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and has contributed code to several free software projects, including the Linux kernel, Blender, Vega Strike, and the Novell Core Protocol Filesystem utilities for Linux.

When not playing with computers, he is a science geek, plays chess, writes and arranges music, sings and plays saxophone and percussion in a local music group, collects old-fashioned books and board games, and is a licensed pilot.

This book would not have been possible without the support of my wife, Patricia, who gave up a good deal of our social time, since my day job required me to write it outside of normal working hours. Thanks, also, go to Sharvari Tawde of Packt Publishing, for encouraging me to take the plunge and write my first, full book, and the rest of the crew at Packt Publishing for helping me through the rough spots. I'd also like to thank my co-workers, especially Kathleen Anderson and Jean Banker, who provided encouragement when I was first offered the opportunity to write this book. Finally, to Louie and Tinkerbelle, the family cats who forced me to take periodic breaks by jumping on the computer keyboard and demanding attention.

Arturo Borrero Gonzlez has been working in the IT environment for almost 5 years now, always with Linux systems.

He is interested in networking and high availability clusters.

For the last 3 years, Arturo's job has been in Centro Informtico Cientfico de Andaluca (CICA), the regional National Research and Education Network (NREN) of Andalusia (Spain). There, he does system administration for the Network Information Security department.

He loves Debian and free/open-source software.

Currently he is collaborating with the Netfilter project. Also, he's trying to get his degree in IT engineering at the University of Seville.

Daniele Raffo has been a happy Linux user since the mid-1990s, and now an LPIC certified Linux Professional. Holder of a Ph.D. in Computer Science and former CERN civil servant, he also has experience in the fields of networking, security, and Java programming. He is the lead author of the official Handbook for Enigmail, the OpenPGP plugin for Mozilla applications.

I would like to thank my parents and Renata for their support, and Linus Torvalds for his extraordinary idea.

Ron Savage is a semi-retired programmer who has been writing software in Perl for a number of decades.

He has a degree in mathematics (astrophysics), but has always worked as a programmer.

He has found that, even using Perl, he still has to write a lot of Bash, SQL, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to design and build databases for servers such as Postgres.

Nevertheless, while writing Perl he's had great fulfillment, and endless opportunities for expressing creativity, and has enjoyed almost every single day's work. Yes, even the hard days.

He's always worked as a self-employed contractor, and has encountered a fascinating range of work. Some instances are:

At BHP (an Australian mining corporation), they bought some American 'Star Wars' technology which fired radar straight down from a plane into the sea, searching for Russian submarines. BHP adapted it to search for seams of minerals (on land), aimed down from a wooden glider towed by a (metallic) plane, and that required processing vast amounts of data, and new ways to visualize such data.