Introduction (and cfengine)

[David Douthitt]

Hello!

I am a UNIX System Administrator from the midwest (Wisconsin), and have 
worked with multiple open source and proprietary UNIX and Linux 
environments.  (I'll skip over the UNIX and non-Red Hat experiences 
unless there is interest.)  I've used Linux on non-Intel machines as 
well as Intel machines (PARISC and PowerPC specifically).  I've used BSD 
systems as well, including  on non-Intel architectures.  I'm also 
certified: RHCE, SCSA, Linux+, and LPI Level 1.

First time I used Linux was Slackware on a 386SX-16MHz machine with 4M 
of RAM; my oldest Red Hat is Red Hat 2 on a Linux User Group CD I still 
have around here.  I also have 4.4BSD Lite and FreeBSD 2.2.6 and OpenBSD 
2.6 on CDs.....

I had my own floppy-based Linux distribution (Oxygen) based on the Linux 
Router Project.  I have, in the past, also "built" my own Red Hat 
Enterprise systems without the benefit of an installer, and also in some 
cases from source RPMs alone (rather than binary RPMs).

As far as cfengine goes, I contribute sporadically to the cfengine 
documentation, mostly proofreading and copyediting.  I will be embarking 
on a book about cfengine shortly (after I complete the GNU screen 
book).  I have run cfengine in a production environment and tend to be 
rather a voracious supporter of cfengine :-)

I've not used puppet, but am a Ruby programmer and would like to learn 
more about it - it was designed after using cfengine and was designed to 
use the power of Ruby.

I'm also a long-time Korn shell scripter - I used ksh for scripting 
before I used ksh as my shell!  (I used csh then, but programmed in ksh.)

I've also programmed in Perl.  I've used Perl since the MSDOS 4.0 port, 
and Ruby since version 1.4.

I also tend to be something of a programmer and programming languages 
nut; I've used FORTH (extensively and comprehensively), Smalltalk 
(dabble), LISP (moderate), and BASIC, C, Pascal, C++, COBOL, SNOBOL, all 
moderate to extensively.  I contributed to the LCDd project briefly 
(mostly revamping the system to use GNU getopts).

I'll be joining the documentation group at the same time.  I'll also 
post a cfengine review shortly.

-- 
David Douthitt
HP-UX, Unixware, Linux, FreeBSD
RHCE, SCSA, Linux+, LPIC-1
http://www.lulu.com/ssrat