This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

Oh dear, where do I start on this? There’s just so many, I can’t help myself, they just happen, it’s a side effect of being a massive geek who doesn’t always think before speaking…

I think the most cringe worthy was recently with an attractive lady who invited me over for drinks and chat at her place. After proceeding to give her lots of exciting information about my laptop, my work and software I was designing, she was naturally en-thrilled and wanted to know more about these exciting things. *

When it was getting late and I was about to leave, she informed me that I “could stay if I wanted” to which I promptly replied “Well that depends, how fast is your wifi?”. **

It just came out without thinking, an automatic response, I dunno what I was thinking  – I’m not exactly sure why she didn’t just boot me out there and then :-/

* so not really

** sadly, this is a true story

This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

I had wanted to post about setting up Solaris 10 with OpenLDAP but my notes need more refining than what I have time for ATM, so instead there’s a lightweight HOWTO on automatically creating home directories during login for centralised authentication setups.

I’ll aim to try and post my Solaris LDAP notes later this week as well. :-)

One of the initial problems I’ve found after setting up LDAP or some other centralised user information and authentication system, is that unless there’s shared storage mounted on all the servers, you need to manually create home directories for users.

Fortunately there’s a nice PAM module that ships with Linux PAM, called pam_mkhomedir which will automatically create a home directory for a user upon login if one doesn’t already exist, basing it off the standard contents of /etc/skel/

The full information can be found in the man page at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/Linux-PAM-html/sag-pam_mkhomedir.html

However it’s even easier for RHEL/CentOS/Fedora users, who can use the ever handy authconfig tool to adjust the PAM configuration with a single CLI command:

# authconfig --enablemkhomedir --update

This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

My first computer would technically have been some long-forgotten i386 that I played around with for a bit, however what I would consider my first true computer was the HP Pavilion 4422 that my parents got me – 433mhz Celeron CPU, 64MB RAM (later upgraded to a speed 192MB), 6GB IDE disk, CDROM drive and a CRT :-D

I started off with that computer running Windows 98 and it was on this computer that I discovered Linux and lead me to the path to becoming the ubergeek that I am today. :-)

It’s actually still running, at my parents as their router/firewall/print server with Red Hat 9, but it really needs replacing at some stage.

Here’s a picture of it in the background behind a much younger version of myself busy discussing matters of vital importance, such as the coolest QBASIC hacks for all the i386 computers in the background to the left.

My favourite computer ever would have to be my Toshiba Libretto U100 ultra-light laptop. The Toshiba Libretto series predated netbooks and packed pretty serious punch for their time, with a Pentium M 1.2Ghz, 1GB RAM, 60GB disk and a sub 1KG weight.

Most amazing was their 7″ LCD screen with 1280×768 resolution, it’s amazingly tiny to look at, I’m sure if I tried to use in 10 years from now I won’t be able to read it.

Words and pictures can’t really describe how small or light this laptop is, it’s barely larger than a VHS tape and incredibly cute.

I still have two of these laptops, however I had to upgrade this year, as the 1GB of RAM just couldn’t cut it any more and my almost 24×7 operation of the laptop since I got it in 2006 has left it slightly unstable and it had started crashing randomly.

But definitely my favourite machine ever, they are quite amazing. :-) I’m starting a collection, currently have two of the U100s (both the white and the blue models) as well as an early classic Libretto 50CT.

This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

My earliest geek experience would have to be as a kid – my dad worked as a mainframe operator for a couple decades, so I vaguely remember being taken to visit him at work through rooms full of computers, racks and other amazingly awesome equipment, thinking how cool it was.

This was back in the early days of Windows 3.1, I seem to remember flying toaster screensavers and donut tape drives. Cool stuff! :-)

This possibly influenced my subconscious (I want to be cool like dad!) but it certainly wasn’t a decision to try being like dad which pushed me into IT or anything – I took a very different path, going down the PC/*NIX way whilst dad has always remained a mainframe operator.

Other than that, my first hands on geek experience was when a family friend gave me an old i386, dad got me DOS onto it and showed me the three commands he knew. I spent ages playing around on it, reading old manuals and figuring bits out for myself. :-)

(As a side note, Dad recently got made redundant from mainframe operations due to a company shift from Wellington to Auckland, if anyone knows a mainframe position that needs someone, please let me know – my mum *really* doesn’t want him retiring although he seems keen on the idea ;-) )

This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

I’ve been heavily into computers for almost a decade, it was never a case of waking up one day and deciding that I want to be an ubergeek, but rather it’s something that just grew on me more and more.

I started using computers around the age of 10 and by 12 was heavily into them, hacking on simple apps and doing my first Linux experimentation. I would spend hours just breaking the system and messing around digging into options and settings I didn’t understand just for the fun of it to see what happens.

It’s very much a personal interest/challenge that’s driven me, the career side of it was just a natural progression once I left school, but was never the intention of learning what I know.

This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

My skillset in PHP development and system administration is pretty strong, so whilst I’ll continue to improve and learn new things in this area, it’s not really an area I’m expanding into.

There are three main areas that I do want to expand my skills in:

1. Network skillset – I’m pretty fluent with IPv4 and various networking concepts and vendors, but I’d like better skills around Cisco IOS devices and JunOS.
2. Low level languages like C/C++ – currently most of my skills are relating to dynamic languages, such as PHP and Perl.
3. AI research – want to do some development relating to AI and information processing/handling.

From early 2011 I should be having a lot more personal time available, so will use this to do some more self-learning and skillset improvement. :-)