deranfangvomen.de - website von florian heigl

florian heigl

munich based systems administrator

private contact: see below.

general interests: unix, networking and storage. professional system administration, with highest degrees of automation. community informatics.

IANA pen: 31362

skillset

I like working with: Xen, Bacula, "real" Unix, FreeBSD, NTP, SNMP, Loadbalancers, NEBS3 telco gear, LVMs, IPv6, Carrier Grade Linux, Cobbler.

For money i'll also work with: Linux, Windows, Exchange, sick french batch schedulers, gigabyte-sized SAN management software.

For no amount of money i'll work with: Sharepoint, Debian Zealots with 2 years of linux experience and 20 years of ego, people that *only* know what their MCSE, LPIC or whatever book told them, and didn't even bother to get even basics like taught in A+, business consultants.

to be honest, often I actually do, but don't expect me to be nice about it...people like these are cheating their employers, nothing more.

CV

(missing) in english... and german

Certifications

i've had more than a dozen certs from brainbench.com by evaluating beta exams for them, which by now are long expired. besides those I'm RHCT+RHCE and a system engineer for IBM blade center systems. While I dont see much value in these, if interested, look at the CV for more detail.

who?

keirsey says: idealist:healer. yes, I live for fixing things, helping people. but... i say: reread the bit about "set off from the rest" kkthxbai.

Currently reading

Anathem
The system of the world
Das Buch der Menschlichkeit
Die neuen Kriege

Currently hacking at

lan switching, vlans, vmps, rstp, odd things
once i feel like booting it: fresh HP-UX bacula binaries
my stupid Adic DLT8k autochanger that won't play nice with Bacula on FreeBSD
my desktop pc that still needs a better storage layout (will end up as another howto i suppose - VxVM boot disk encapsulation - YUCK)
my flat, still needs some refurnishing

Collecting

niche and highend hardware, from ALR Revolution 6x6 via iPivot Global directors to really odd stuff like a Motorola Vanguard 6540.
Dead software projects that were too far ahead of their time. yes, really.
insults for the times when bash doesn't act like ksh and vim doesn't behave like vi - in their respective fully compatible modes, of course.
Good pictures magically beamed off flickr onto my walls

Gallery

over time I've taken a lot of pictures, some of them actually good, many more that still need some kind of filing, tagging, postprocessing and sorting out.

i'm rebuilding my old static html gallery into something that looks quite web2.0, so far it is not available online because I hate coding, missing features and database design. for the time being I have a working gallery at Google's Picasa.

It's not skinnable, doesn't allow tagging or tag-based streams, the uploads suck and it's size limited, but, well.it exists.

Howtos/Projects

i'm aware actual links would be great, some of this had been in my blog site and went amiss with it.

freebsd pxe netinstall - this is long lost, but i still got a picture of our lab setup, shortly before we wiped our friend's disk by a little error in the partitioning template
isdn ppp fuer freebsd 4.4 (german)
spass mit dem syslogd (2002,german)
lock-unix tips zum absichern von Unix-netzen (2003,german)
hpux 11.11 postinstall tipps
using pkgsrc on hpux from source
using pkgsrc on hpux from binary kit
bacula ocfs2 cluster howto
building a linux lab network in ~~3 hours~~ a day
XenDistro - by now long dead stake at creating the perfect Xen Host (*2005-2008) - please see the docs section there, most points / best practices are still valid and not widely known.
Bacula HP-UX binaries (the old ISP lost them! Keep hands and feet away from "Ultraserver")
justblog.blogdns.org - 2nd-oldest free blog site based on AntVille; inactive due to some database corruption and non-existant support by the creators. it had started out as my network documentation system and was up for about 1400 days, home to up to 60 blogs with one or two well-known ones.
nagswitch - Nagios SNMP Switch scanner (Please mind the tbd license - contact me if you intend to modify or use it in production. don't even think of GPL'ing it, I wrote it to help people, not to support propaganda.)
a short roundup on Xen and getting your KVM functions into a "Desktop" domU" (german)

besides that I do a lot of freebsd/hp-ux support on irc (see below), did a few translations for various OSS projects and made the HP-UX pkgsrc port happen by nagging the right people more often than they could bear, and a few dozen 8hour bulk chain builds. Also something I'm always keen on working with is Bacula, the only backup tool I like better than NetWorker.

Networking

I think everyone should overcome PIO mode issues by using an Acard IDE to LVD bridge, connecting it to an IBM LVD to FC-AL bridge and hooking that up to a nice Cisco SN5428 FC to iSCSI bridge so they can finally use the DVD drive on their laptop!

After relying more and more heavily on virtualized servers, it got quite tricky to implement a lab network with hosts and separate switches. A sketch of my lab network goes here.

Things i'd like to work on

building a hackerspace in munich somewhat apart of the CCC, a mix of the hat factory (for people that need to work) and the C-Base (for creative people of all kinds). The CCC one founded in 2008 is nice, but ummm, it seems not all that open. ;)
found a nagios user group, either in munich or on a larger scale, with emphasis on developing a Optimum (not "oracle") Flexible Architecture for Nagios with a few bright heads that can actually commit back their work, much different from what most commercial projects focus on.
bacula ftp handler, arno and I discussed it once, but both felt it would ruin our days to actually implement it.
build a pkgsrc build cluster like FreeBSD has for it's tinderbox. So far every time I planned to really invest time into this, I dropped it, because it's too boring to start on your own.

Some of my friends that are actually online, somewhere

Deniz Roth
Yalla
Thomas "Ibn" Lazar, he knows how to code, but would be grumpy enough to get hired as a sysadmin, too.
Mel Woe, a graphics goddess.
Christoph Bohm (Company Website, buy from him, I also do!)
Oliver Lehmann
Cecile Neu. My computing idol. :)
Sonja ^ka^ Oettl
Simone (thanks to her *grin* we got our wonderful daughter Zoe)
Julian Willer
frank, Herr Argh.de und "ausserdem" ein sehr angenehmer Mensch.
Manfred Gloiber (I wonder if you still got a working website :p )
missing ones...

and some more who aren't :)

IRC

i can be found on the following networks/channels, by the nick 'darkfader':

ircnet:#dssg - de.news.subkultur.gothic
ircnet:#freebsd.de - German FreeBSD Channel
ircnet:#sgi - SGI users / fanbois Channel
ircnet:#hpux - HP-UX support / discussion
dhcnet:#albert - Random computer geek talk with very nice regulars
freenode:#picisoc - The Pacific islands internet society. I also host a mirror of the PACINET meeting CDs, a link to it is missing right now.
freenode:#hpux - HP-UX support, pkgsrc/HP-UX port
freenode:#infrastructures - Discussion about infrastructure administration
freenode:#cobbler - Support / discussion for users of RedHats GREAT provisioning system
blafasel:#blafasel - local munich chat network i've been around at for many years

please note i'm not affilated with that other guy "DarkFader" that started using the name a few years after me and might be slightly related to your broken nintendo ds. althought I don't care about it, either.

ICQ/Email

my email address can be obtained using the DENIC whois interface. My ICQ number is known to everyone who's supposed to know it. for legal matters, refer to the Admin-C handle for this domain as it's intended.

Final thoughts

on a side note, while i've started using CSS back in 1999, I forgot most, if not all of my webdesign experience by now. feel invited to complain about this rather minimalistic website, and i'll email you the sketches for the rework that spawned it, so you can build it for me. thanks.

my site had been down / changing addresses for almost 4 years now and this had all the best effects - I have been literally flushed out of the internet. After 13 years there is a lot of traces I'd rather not see any longer, and magically they're all out of the google indexes! :)

no, i don't have any idea why i picked english for the text. sorry to my german-speaking relatives and friends.