I’m a sysadmin-by-accident since about 1998. I co-founded netzkommune.de in 2000 and now we mostly specialize in managed hosting and consulting.
I kinda stumbled into the whole Internet business pretty much after high school, while working part time at a dotcom-startup in 1998. Being the only person who “knew” Linux (I had installed some Linux distro from floppy in ~1995 on my 486), I was tasked with all things non-Windows, running stock qmail back when it was pretty new.
When starting netzkommune, we ran some Slackware and/or Red Hat
(I don’t quite recall), hosted on an AMD K6 at Rackspace. When
talking to a friend about qmail and how complicated patching and
installing it, he showed me the FreeBSD ports system and how
installing qmail there was just cd /usr/ports/mail/qmail && make
install. The next box I set up was FreeBSD 4.3 and I never looked
back. Today, all of our servers run FreeBSD, its main benefits for
us are ZFS, jails and poudriere. Being able to prepackage and test
things with our own/multiple configs, takes the edge off of most
of packaging tasks, knowing there are replicated snapshots of pretty
much everything as an addition to offsite backups for quick recovery
of a fatfingered file modification, is invaluable to us.
Not being a developer, I still feel I can grasp most of the OS’s processes and architecture, that simplicity a huge plus that most people seem to have forgotten about.
Find me on Twitter and Mastodon.
Hosted by OpenBSD Amsterdam
Sponsored by netzkommune