www.devco.net by r.i.pienaar

About

I was born in South Africa in 1975 and went to school at the High School Ferdinand Postma in Potchefstroom. I moved to Cape Town in 1998 where I worked in a number of I.T. positions.

I moved to London in 2002 when my employer transfered me to the office there.  I am a Systems Administrator currently running my own consulting company specializing in custom made Linux solutions based on my experience spanning more than a decade in very large multi national companies.

For the last few years I've spent a lot of time focused on configuration management using tools like CFEngine or Puppet where I help all sizes of business optimize the management of their servers and to do repeated rollouts with consistant results.  An effective configuration management strategy is key to scaling and reacting rapidly to customer demands.  I can usually be found in #puppet on Freenode using nick Volcane.

I am usually involved with computers in some way or the other. I have been using Unix and Unix like systems since the early '90s. My Linux Counter entry was created in September 1995, I think I started some time in December 1993 though but did not have an internet connection then, so my entry only came later. I started out with the SLS 1.03 distribution of Linux in the days of pre 1.0 kernels.

I am the author of several open source projects:

• The Marionette Collective server orchastration and several plugins
• Ruby PDNS - Open Source GSLB
• Flashpolicyd - A multi threaded Ruby based Flash Policy server
• Passmakr - A simple ruby based password generator
• Nagger - A multi protocol pluggable nagiosn notification bot
• Ruby Nagios - CLI and library for doing bulk operations on nagios services

My main hobby when not doing computer related work is in photography, you can see some of my photos at my Flickr Page

I do not get much time for reading thesedays but I mostly read technical books or books from the likes of Neal Stephenson, Ian Banks, Robert Rankin and Terry Pratchett.