New Here... First Project

[David White]

Hi Folks,
I wanted to formally introduce myself to you guys here in the Infrastructure Group. My name is David White, and I am a server administrator who has dabbled in programming (but doesn't like it), am a computer technical specialist by day (currently), and am a hopeful entrepreneur in building up a web hosting, technical support, and IT consulting organization that will target mainly nonprofit organizations world wide. I eventually would like a "segment" of this business to work in the disaster relief side of things...

I have experience with operating CentOS and Ubuntu servers, I love the Linux shell, have worked in the MySQL shell, and I love open source. I don't like programming (and am frankly terrible at it) or "web development" although I do enjoy working from inside (admining) CMSs. I have extensive experience with Drupal.

I'm very busy at the moment, as some of you know, but hopefully by the early part of next week, things will calm down for me. I'm working a full time job as a tech support specialist right now, and am running my business of web hosting, etc... on the side (which, as I've already said, I hope to grow into something full time within the next 2-3 years).

I've been chatting with Heather, Ted, and Lori on Skype over the past couple of evenings, and I know that a lot of discussion has been thrown out about the method of instant communication. I'm an IRC guy, but I respect Heather's decision to use Skype for the current Japan crisis, and will do everything I can to support the efforts on that front.

To that end, I just purchased an old Poweredge 1300 last weekend (for $10 bucks!) for me to mess around with, have a testing environment for my production VPSs, and run some backups. Since I'm likely going to be connecting it to the internet (through my home internet connection), I've been talking with Ted about setting up a simple logging mechanism on the box, and automatically uploading the logs (say, once / day) to the Wiki. I could also obviously do some greps and what-not to compile a list of all the links and keywords mentioned throughout the day.

Any thoughts on this? If this project is being worked on actively by someone else, then be my guest - finish it up! But if not, then I'm willing to tackle this one and hopefully have something up and running by the middle - to late part of next week.

Once the simple logging is in place, then we can go back later and start doing fancy stuff with bots. But for now, I think everyone agrees that logging is needed.

Also, I'm on a very reliable home internet connection - I live in Chattanooga, and am on EPB's Fiber Optic connection - they are on the few cities in the world right now to have 1GB connections available for home users (we're not on that fast of a connection, but still!). So with that said, I'd be willing to provide my IP address to some folks to login to the box and mess around.

- David

--
- David White -
Smooth Stone Services
Computer Technical Support, IT Services, & Web Hosting Solutions
http://www.smoothstoneservices.com
da...@smoothstoneservices.com
Blog: http://www.davidmartinwhite.com

[deborah shaddon]

Hi guys,

Dave and Ted, check out these 2 projects under Infrastructure Working
Group, and register your interest:

We started the requirements/outlaying for the IRC Logging a while back
(I just cleaned up):
http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Project/IRC_Logging

I've restarted this one for stuff we need to do on shoring-up some IRC/
Skype stuff (not necessarily sexy, but this is an area that CCIWG
needs help in too):
http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Project/CHAT_Collab

You can see where all of this can fit in. In general, we need to be
able to create this sort of capability hosted at our provider (OSL)
with our establishing admin procedures (ie, we want to remove
ourselves directly from sysadmin), so I think different approaches are
ok, we just need to recast ourselves in that light. If we can
greenlight a dev solution, we can probably get dev space there to work
it out.

Thanks!!
Deborah

> Computer Technical Support, IT Services, & Web Hosting Solutionshttp://www.smoothstoneservices.com
> da...@smoothstoneservices.com
> Blog:http://www.davidmartinwhite.com