About
About this site:
I started this weblog in 2007 after I kept having ideas for technical things I could post about to my personal blog, but at least one non-technical friend/reader didn’t want to slog through incomprehensible technical nonsense to get to the good parts (the complaints about the White Sox). So there you go.
As for the name: /etc/system is the name of the kernel config file on Solaris. As names go, it could always be worse: I could have made a pam reference.
About Sabrina:
I have been a professional system administrator since 1996. I use a lot of Linux these days, but I’ve wrangled more than my fair share of Solaris systems on Sun hardware, a handful of (Free|Open)BSD systems, a sprinkling of BSD/OS systems if you look back far enough, and I even (sigh) had to put up with Digital UNIX and (gak) SCO UNIX one time. I don’t really have a favorite, but I do know Solaris prior to 10 pretty well. I haven’t yet had an excuse to really play with 10, which is really not fair at all because I was waiting for years for someone to come up with DTrace. I suffered through trying to use the Porsche book long past its sell-by date. I earned DTrace. Dammit.
I live in Chicago, Illinois, where I work for a privately held trading firm downtown as a sysadmin. I am currently working to keep a small herd of SuSE systems and MySQL databases in some semblance of order, and to convince our developers why they should let me package up their software in pretty little RPMs instead of just using svn.
I am a member of The League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) and SAGE, and a past member of the SAGE Ethics committee.
About Dan:
A very long time ago I worked at Bungie. I started my first full-time IT job in 1996, at an Ivy Plus university. Desktop support. Yes. I climbed (scrabbled? clawed?) my way up to system administrator by 2001. It was around this time I met Sabrina. I noticed many of the sysadmins I knew in other departments using a lot of Linux. I had years of Windows experience and even more Mac experience, why not go for the hat trick? It’s been a hard road, I’ll admit, but I’m confident I’d make a fine Jr Linux Sysadmin and even a good Famous Ray’s Original Sysadmin in the right environment.
While I’m primarily a Windows admin by the amount of experience, I’m probably best described as a generalist, since I also have significant experience with Macintosh, Linux (and a bit of Solaris and FreeBSD), web development, CISCO firewalls, and I even have experience collaborating with old-school POTS folks.
I live in
