Hello!

I am a UNIX System Administrator from the midwest (Wisconsin), and have worked with multiple open source and proprietary UNIX and Linux environments. (I'll skip over the UNIX and non-Red Hat experiences unless there is interest.) I've used Linux on non-Intel machines as well as Intel machines (PARISC and PowerPC specifically). I've used BSD systems as well, including on non-Intel architectures. I'm also certified: RHCE, SCSA, Linux+, and LPI Level 1.

First time I used Linux was Slackware on a 386SX-16MHz machine with 4M of RAM; my oldest Red Hat is Red Hat 2 on a Linux User Group CD I still have around here. I also have 4.4BSD Lite and FreeBSD 2.2.6 and OpenBSD 2.6 on CDs.....

I had my own floppy-based Linux distribution (Oxygen) based on the Linux Router Project. I have, in the past, also "built" my own Red Hat Enterprise systems without the benefit of an installer, and also in some cases from source RPMs alone (rather than binary RPMs).

As far as cfengine goes, I contribute sporadically to the cfengine documentation, mostly proofreading and copyediting. I will be embarking on a book about cfengine shortly (after I complete the GNU screen book). I have run cfengine in a production environment and tend to be rather a voracious supporter of cfengine :-)

I've not used puppet, but am a Ruby programmer and would like to learn more about it - it was designed after using cfengine and was designed to use the power of Ruby.

I'm also a long-time Korn shell scripter - I used ksh for scripting before I used ksh as my shell! (I used csh then, but programmed in ksh.)

I've also programmed in Perl. I've used Perl since the MSDOS 4.0 port, and Ruby since version 1.4.

I also tend to be something of a programmer and programming languages nut; I've used FORTH (extensively and comprehensively), Smalltalk (dabble), LISP (moderate), and BASIC, C, Pascal, C++, COBOL, SNOBOL, all moderate to extensively. I contributed to the LCDd project briefly (mostly revamping the system to use GNU getopts).

I'll be joining the documentation group at the same time. I'll also post a cfengine review shortly.