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About me

I am working as a system administrator since 1993.

My first employer, a railroad construction company based in Neunkirchen/Saar with branches in Mannheim and Erfurt ran Novell Netware 3.11 LAN with about 20-30 MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 Clients. There I was also involved in maintaining and developing several database applications created with Clipper and Dbase, later with Borland Delphi.

1996: time to learn HTML and do the homepage stuff, entering the shiny new online world!

1998: first contact with Linux - I made my first steps with SuSE Linux 5.2

In 2000 I moved to a dotcom startup running the internet community site www.fitness.com.

In early 2001 I began supporting the parent of our company, the TC Holdings, an affiliated group of fitness centers with 12 branches in Germany and 8 branches in Switzerland. My job was to introduce a Linux server in each fitness center acting as a file server, router, and database synchronizer for the application they used to administer their members. All branches where connected to the centralized membership administration server, one in Germany and one in Switzerland (near Zurich). And of course Germany and Switzerland were synchronized, too.

This episode ended late 2003, when the German branch and headquarter got insolvent and was liquidated. I supported the swiss branch until late 2004.

In 2003 I changed over to my current employer, beeing the senior system administrator.

In early 2004 I decided to switch from SuSE to Debian as the preferred linux distribution for our servers, a decision I had never to regret.

Since then, a minority of CentOS and RedHat Enterprise Linux hosts joined our friendly Debian family. On my private laptop I wanted to try out Ubuntu and now both Ubuntu and MS Windows are connected there in intimate togetherness ;-)