Who am I to write a blog about Systems Administration? That’s a good question which deserves an answer.
Profile/Career
I am a 34 years old German, ran my own business in Germany (Systems Administration on a call-in basis, providing managed web servers for business customers, selling additional products like domain services, SSL certificates). Before I quit in order to take a new challenge in the UK, I handed over a triple-digit number of servers to my companion, who I ran the company with. Apart from a majority of more or less plain LAMP installations, there were also some very special setups which I planned and implemented for our customers, including but not limited to clusters, storages, and very individual configurations. To give some keywords (each keyword means at least several months if not years of active experience):
systems administration Linux/Unix (Debian, CentOS, RedHat, Fedora Core, Solaris, FreeBSD), voice over IP (Asterisk), server cluster, virtualisation (VMware, XEN, OpenVZ), network storages (e.g. NetApp, clustered filesystems), VPN/IPsec, data security, firewalls, failover strategies, web and database servers (LAMP, Apache, PHP, MySQL), mail servers (Postfix, Courier, anti virus, spam filter), Java application servers (SunONE, SJSAS, Tomcat, JBoss), and many more.
Also I gained a lot of experience developing with PHP, Java/EE/Hibernate, and recently C# (running on both Windows .NET and Mono for Linux/MacOS).
The reason why I decided to quit my old company was that I wanted to take a completely new challenge. It has been a dream of mine for many years to live and work in London. That’s why I moved here in January 2008. A company which runs different unique information services and portals for real estate agencies offered me an interesting job. So I started to work there mid January 2008.
In August I accepted another even more interesting offer from a London-based educational TV channel. There, I am mainly responsible for the integration of Autonomy®/IDOL®, the implementation of a proper software release process (using SVN, defining clear policies etc.), and systems administration on both our development and production environment. I was able to introduce virtualisation (our development environment is a huge monster server, running 11 VMs — a virtual replica of the physical production environment), was planning the new production infrastructure (many virtualised components as well), and I was currently in “mission control” for the swing from the old website to the new one. “New website” means that we were changing almost the whole underlying infrastructure, too, to allow more robustness and scalability for the future.
Besides, I developed different software in Adobe Flex, Java/Hibernate, and C# — all of them playing important roles in the “big picture”.
My own part-time business, called The Ally London, which is focused on BSD/Linux Systems Administration, Consultancy and Support, is a result of my passion. I really do love to plan, implement, and fiddle around with servers and networks.
I shall not forget to mention my way of contributing to the Open Source community: After having been using OSS for so many years, it was time to give something back. So here’s Octopus, a high-performance, and reasonably fail-safe logging server, written in C#, running on .NET and Mono, and licensed under the GPL v3.
Private/Activities
When I am not sitting in front of a computer, I like to explore London (preferably with my girl-friend wife), play Snooker or Billards, watch movies or DVDs, listen to music (Punk, Rock, Metal), visit live concerts, meet other people (for example from the German community in London). I consider myself quite laid-back, and don’t take myself too seriously.
When I moved to London beginning of last year, I planned to stay here for at least six months. But in fact I’ve been here for more than 1.5 years now, and it’s very unlikely that I will ever go back, as my private and professional life have developed far better than initially expected, and my wife doesn’t speak German (nor do I speak her native language).
Sysconfig? Where did this stupid name come from?
A good question. It came from /dev/random aka my brain, when I created my twitter account (which happened just recently, as I had not quite understood what the fuzz was about). More precisely, it’s one of my two twitter accounts — the more technical one, obviously.
When Facebook decided to offer short names for users as well, a sort of vanity URLs, I also assigned that one. So I thought it made sense to use the same name for my blog, too, as a matter of consistency. You don’t need to like the name. You need to like my blog! 
Organisation memberships
The Linux User Group of London
The UK FreeBSD Users’ Group
Disclaimer/Copyright
All articles in this blog represent my sole opinion and/or experience. They shall not be considered generally applicable. I will not be held responsible for any damage or data loss or other problems caused by using information contained in any article of this blog. This blog does not follow any business objectives. It is my individual point of view, without any commercial interest.
If you think that this disclaimer sounds dodgy, you are probably right. I am not going to copy any disclaimers from other people’s websites nor will I hire a solicitor to write a proper disclaimer. This is my diary. Nothing more, nothing less. 
Needless to say that copying content from this website is not allowed, unless you request and receive a written permission. Feel free to link to this blog or certain articles, if you are too lazy to request a permission to copy content.
Thanks for reading this blog and this page.
Carsten Heesch
Senior Systems Administrator, London
