[Ryedale] Welcome to RyeLUG Paul Elliott

[Paul Elliott]

Hello all,

I thought it would be useful to introduce myself as suggested by Al so
here goes.

I first experienced Linux in 1997 when I discovered a few servers at
my employers running Redhat Linux 4.1 (Vanderbilt). I was curious how
this seemingly basic command line based operating system could compete
with NT 4 that had been released a year previous or with Novell
Netware that we used for the majority of our servers. What a voyage of
discovery it has been ever since!

I originally started dabbling at home with Redhat Linux, Slackware and
to a lesser extent Debian although none of them displaced NT as my OS
of choice until I purchased Linux Answers in 1999, a one off pilot
magazine in the UK that later became Linux Format. This helped me
realise the true power offered by Linux and the whole concept of Free
and Open Source software. Pirating software had never sat easy on my
conscience although at the time I had little option if I wanted to
find a role in the IT industry. As a side note, I still have my
original copy of Linux Answers. I frequently look back at it to remind
me just how far Linux has developed over the years.

I switched entirely to Linux around 2001 and have never looked back
since. Originally I settled on Redhat Linux until the product was
canned in 2003 to my (and my employers) immense annoyance. This
prompted me to look at other options and I discovered just how
incredible Debian is as an operating system. I stuck with Debian for
around a year before switching to Ubuntu.

I'm now employed as a UNIX sysadmin for a university. My day to day
job revolves almost entirely around working on UNIX systems (both
Linux and Solaris) although I'm also heavily involved in managing a
couple of VMware clusters. My main workload at the moment is
developing a Linux build system based around Puppet, RHEL and Ubuntu
server.

On the personal side, I live in a village just outside of Driffield
with my wife, daughter, 2 cats, 1 rabbit and far too much computer
kit. I'm a member of Hull, Beverley and York LUGs although I've never
attended any LUG meetings so far. I hope to change this by attending a
Ryedale meeting at some point in the near future. See you all then.

-- 
Paul Elliott (omahn)
omahns.home at gmail.com