Introduction

[Jima]

  Hi folks!

  As per the "Getting Started" walkthrough, I thought I'd spam you guys 
with a brief rundown of who I am, although I'm sure a number of you 
already know.
  My name is Patrick Laughton, although most people who know me call me 
Jima (yes, IRL, too).  I hail from the Great White North -- Minneapolis, 
MN, or thereabouts.  (That's in the Central US time zone, CDT/GMT-5.) 
I've been maintaining Linux boxen for maybe ten years, seven of those 
professionally.  I started out with Slackware (how's that for cutting your 
teeth?), but long ago moved to Red Hat, and then Fedora.

  Like many in Fedora Packager Land, I got started because as a sysadmin, 
there were often packages I needed that weren't otherwise easily 
available.  So I packaged what I needed, threw them in a repository, and 
went on my merry way.  What a pain.
  I joined Fedora Extras about 16 months ago to offset some of that heavy 
lifting.  In addition to making sure everything I needed was in Fedora, I 
took on some orphaned packages, and generally looked for other ways I 
could help out the project.  That's what brings me to Infrastructure; to 
see if any of my possibly mediocre skills as a sysadmin might in some way 
benefit the bigger picture.

  I'll be up-front: I'm not a programmer.  I can't code worth crap.  I know 
a little C (not C++), my perl talents are decent (if sloppy and 
roundabout), but I can shell script like mad.
  I'm fairly comfortable with Apache, BIND, dnsmasq, Exim, OpenSSH, 
Postfix, and Sendmail.  Okay, if it's a daemon, I'm probably not too bad 
with it.  I've played with Nagios and MRTG on and off over the years, as 
well.  More recently (in the last year or so) I've gotten fairly good at 
working with Xen.  Not KVM, sadly, due to my general lack of machines with 
hardware virtualization capabilities.
  My SCM, database, and clustering skills leave a lot to be desired, mainly 
because I haven't had any real use for them in my job.  Also, I'm 
entirely useless at design, unless you like plain, unformatted text, and 
stick figures.  Anything HTML is liable to be compliant, just ugly and/or 
boring.

  I don't have any specific goals in mind for getting into Infrastructure; 
as I said, I'd be happy to help out with anything that could use some 
extra hands.

  I think that pretty well covers things.  Geez, I should have just updated 
my resume; it might have been easier, if a little more glossed-over.
  Have a nice day.

      Jima