Systems Administration through Eclectic Tech

When I began doing web design I was also doing some prepress work that involved Sun stations (Dolev printing) and I began administering machines that weren't only desktop computers.

Then I started doing web design because I was never happy with the output rendered by gui-oriented web design programs. They've come a long way, but I'm a coder at heart, so I program my sites by hand.

A site needs a server. I tried using a hosting service for a while, but when it boiled down to it I was doing much of my own command-line administration for websites anyway -- then my hosting service no longer supported my site. I had to find another service or another server. I realized that if I wanted it done right, I'd just have to do it myself.

The punch line is that after all of that I've come to be a paid systems admin -- mail, web, file services, you-name-it.

• BSD/*nix environment administration
• OS X Server and client administration
• mail administration: Postfix, Cyrus, SpamAssassin, Procmail, Fetchmail, Sendmail, etc.
• Apache configuration
• MySQL, PHP (web and CLI), Perl (CGI), Javascript, PostgreSQL
• DHTML/css, HTML, XHTML
• Nagios
• command-line administration: ftp, ssh/telnet/shell, scp, vi, Subversion, sed, grep
• Open Firmware (Apple's equivalent of a Bios)