[Tux with a branding iron]

Kansas City Linux User Group

[Tux with a branding iron]

Notes From Mike

I'm a jack-of-all-trades who currently works for Andrew Corporation. We make most of the cell and PCS antennae for Motorola and Sprint, as well as 90% of most broadcast and microwave antennae. Everywhere you see a red and white tower, antennae or a red lightning bolt, that's Andrew. Currently I'm Andrew's firewall guy, HP OpenView lackey, 3Com guru (RIP) and backup unix sysadmin. Most of what I know of unix I learned while wasting time in college. I started playing with FreeBSD and Linux back in 1991 and have stuck with it ever since. I remember running pre 1.0 kernels on my 386dx40 w/32 megs of ram. I remember writing my own xconfig for a tseng lab et4000 using dotclocks plugged into an sc spreadsheet so...that means by today's standards, I'm old :-)

So what does this have to do with KCLUG? Everything! I am passionate about using free software in the real work, especially linux. Also I love new technology, especially new technology for Linux that solves real world problems. Recently I came across 3ware's disk-switch IDE raid controller. Let's just say I was totally impressed and now can't wait to try some of their newer products for Linux. Every month I plan to get one new technology for Linux product, use it in the real world, and then report back to KCLUG if the product lived up to its claim. For the month of July, I'm reviewing the administrative features of the 3ware disk controller. The real world use is it part of the backup server for KCLUG.