I live in the seaside town of Brighton on the south coast of England
and I'm working at the moment for Mistral Internet, a business ISP based in my
home town. I'm Mistrals Provisioning Manager - this basically means it's down to me to see that the services
ordered by our clients are delivered to them in an accurate and timely manner. I have a team of great guys working for
me, and like most line managers, I get to bask in their reflected glory... :-)
As you might guess from the domain name, Linux is what this site is primarily about. My first encounter with Linux was when PCW Magazine included a copy of FT-Linux 1.1 on their cover CD. It wasn't much good, although admittedly my general UNIX experience at the time (I was working as an applications programmer for a software house) didn't amount to much, so perhaps if I'd persevered with it I might have learned a bit more. If I remember correctly, this was round about 93/94 or thereabouts.
Fast forward 3 years, and I've had enough of being a code monkey, turning out the same boring applications software week in, week out. I ask to move into a more technical role, and start to get paid for supporting the firms IBM RS/6000 systems running AIX. This is my first taste of a commercial UNIX-like operating system. After a couple of years I'm starting to wonder about Linux again...by a bizarre coincidence, PCPlus Magazine decide to get in on the Linux act during the summer of 1998 and put a stripped down copy of SuSe 5.3 on their cover CD. I waste no time in getting it installed and realize with delight how much Linux has evolved. It also helps that I've learned how to use vi properly in the meantime and can also tell one end of an IP address from the other...
It doesn't take me long to figure out that IBMs AIX operating system, lovely though it is, has been keeping me away from a lot of what goes on behind the scenes, so I decide that it's about time I got to grips with a real UNIX operating system.
Almost 4 years later, I'm being paid to support Linux systems, and my little stash of knowledge now includes stuff like IP networking, routing protocols, DNS, mail delivery systems, web servers, HTML, XML, Javascript, Perl, Python, Kernel bits and bobs, etc, etc. All of this has been due to the way (most of) the Linux community is willing to help newcomers and provide the means to assist the older hands when they get stuck on something. Thanks, dudes, I couldn't have done it without you, and here's hoping that my small corner of cyberspace will help do the same for someone else.
