I have a 15-year hands on experience deploying and administering GNU/Linux based systems and servers.

My interests include (but are not limited to) any IT infrastructure that uses the GNU/Linux OS as a core component for:

• Virtualization (Qemu/KVM)
• Application Containerization (Docker/systemd-nspawn)
• Container Orchestration (Kubernetes/Docker Swarm)
• Networking (Openvswitch/VXLAN)

Currently I hold the position of IT Systems Engineer at noris M.I.K.E. a subsidiary of noris network AG. I operate, maintain and improve various workloads that run on highly available Openshift clusters. Some of my tasks include:

• The maintenance of Openstack resources that are used by Openshift clusters
• The operation and maintenace of the Openshift clusters
• The operation and maintenace of VMs that run containerized workloads
• The operation of various GoCD and Gitlab pipelines
• Configuration management via Ansible
• System monitoring via Prometheus and Grafana

I came across GNU/Linux for the first time in 2003. It was a Knoppix live cd. That was love at first sight. When I saw the boot sequence, all the messages about the services coming up until the desktop screen, that same moment I knew that was exactly what I was looking for. For the next years I was delving deep into this fascinating world. I ditched windows completely in 4 years. Linux distributions that I have extensively experimented with are:

• Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS
• Debian / Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Mint
• Arch
• Gentoo

I have been using Arch as my main OS for the last 12 years.

After having used the GNU/Linux desktop for years I needed something more. So I started trying server distros and deploying various kinds of services on them. My preferred distributions for server deployments are:

• Ubuntu
• CentOS
• Debian
• Arch

Servers that I have deployed include:

• Web Servers (Nginx)
• VPN Servers (OpenVPN)
• DHCP Servers (ISC KEA)
• Directory / Accounting Services (OpenLDAP, SSSD, FreeRADIUS)
• File Servers (Samba, NFS)
• DNS Servers (BIND9, NSD, Unbound)
• Load Balancers (HAProxy)
• Linux Bridges (Openvswitch)

The world of GNU/Linux and F/LOSS is fascinating.