A New Flavour

"Mmmmm, minty..."


I have been using UNIX since tech college, this was before it became a university.  My first introduction to UNIX was AIX.  Back in those days it was all telnet and text no GUI.  We had fun learning the intricacies of ls and battling with Vi.  Though most of us enterprising students simply FTPed the files over to Windows and used Notepad.  Not to mention writing SQL against Oracle on that same system, it truly was big iron stuff or so we thought.

Fast forward a few years, called down to an issue at site while I was working in Wellington, New Zealand.  There was a problem with the document management system talking to a Sybase SQL server running on Netware.  The kicker, command line access only.  Thank goodness for the previous experiences at tech.  I certainly was not put off and we (the resident sys admin and I) got everything hooked back up.

The next experience was when I went to work for the major telecoms supplier.  This time it was Solaris, back when it was the dot in dot com (late 90's to the slow ones in the back).  Again telnet was the tool of choice.  The entire eCommerce system was running on that, using at its core an installation of Isocor X.400 and EDI.  It was also running MQSeries and Post.Office SMTP servers.  This is where I got my love of mail servers from.   The whole thing was stitched together from bash scripts.  But it ran.  I had a lot of fun in that job grepping SMTP logs, battling a SPAM relay "issue" for a weekend due to oops firewall rules (thankfully not managed by our group).  I guess being in that environment and coming back to Windows (we did have a Windows NT server or two running Isocor was well) really helped with the flexibility in my approach these days.

So what is this new flavour all about?

I have decided to live with Linux at home, it is a good way to keep my skills current and also investigate new ones, I have been meaning to install and play with Nginx for a while as I have read good things about this web server.  To this end I have installed Mint Linux, sure Ubuntu is great but the whole Unity/Gnome 3 thing, I don't know.  I prefer a more traditional interface and if by moving towards a more tablet/mobile interface it broadens the market for these companies that is great, but Mint hits all the right buttons for me.

I like eye candy as well so one of the deciding factors was the new Cinnamon interface offered by Mint.

I am certainly going to enjoy this journey, but for others it may also be a journey you want to take, a recent article is showing that system administrators with Linux skills can earn up to 5% above the average. It also states that there will be a demand for this skill set in the years to come and major internet sites (Facebook, Twitter to name a couple) utilise Linux and open source technologies.

I also see it every day at work.  The deeper you get into VMWare the more you bump into its Linux heritage. Plus a lot if not all of the SAN and storage technologies grew out of the *NIX space.  These days it can't be just a Windows world, so I would urge you to explore other systems and technologies, even if only via a desktop virtual machine.