I have not followed the typical geek career path. I did not start a computer club in high school nor did I go to college for a computer science degree. I actually did theater in high school and for 7 years after I graduated. I worked in television, live music, and theater. I was at theme parks, dinner theaters, and cruise ship. But during all this time I always had access to a computer of some sort. And unlike most kids I was not all that interested in games. I wanted to know how computers worked and what I could do with them.
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My first computer didn't do much for me. The TI-99/4a
was a basic little machine. I recall staying up all night to type in an
inch worm program written in basic, just to turn it off after it ran
for 10 minutes. I must have been 10 or 11 at the time. The only other
thing I recall doing with this was playing Hunt the Wumpus. So much for
not gaming.
My second computer brought me to the world of BBS's and CompuServe. The Atari 800XL
was my window into the another world, albeit a rather small window at
only 40 columns. I bought the CompuServe software, yes I was surprised
too, and ran up a nice little fortune on my moms phone bill. But it
didn't last too long I needed cash for a trip and it was sold to my
alien photography teacher.From there I used a bunch of other people computers, x86 mostly. Found the Internet in 1995 and supported a SGI weather graphics system at a TV station in Ohio. I left entertainment in 1996, went back to school for a MIS degree
Going back to school required me to complete a new required course. The new class taught incoming freshman the wonders of Word. The class consisted of a lab session for learning word processing and a lecture on the history of computing. Oddly enough I was reading a book on just that subject so when I started answering obscure questions I was offered a job. And so my IT career started with a tech support position for the Dept. of Family Medicine at The University of Cincinnati.
This position was perfect. I had free reign to explore all sorts of ideas. I was still working mostly in windows but I would soon make a positive turn. A request from a good friend prompted me to looking into other operating systems. So I had Linux running and not long after I registered my own domain.
As the number of systems I had to watch over grew I started looking at monitoring tools.
The first was tkined,
this is/was a nice little tool written in TCL and it is useful for snmp
enabled nodes. It is also rather out of date. The last release is from
2001.It wasn't long before I needed something new. That new came in the form of Netsaint, which is now Nagios. I have used Nagios continually since and only recent switch to the fork Icinga. Icinga looks to provide a much faster development cycle over Nagios, while retaining all that is good.
In the mean time I have worked with some great tech and wonderful people. I have handled Windows, Netware, Linux, and Solaris, plus a smattering of HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD. I have many opinions about technology and some are even useful.
Thanks,
Syd
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