Kudos! And an Introduction

[Howard Owen]

Well, you obviously took my whining to heart. 8)

Other than taking credit for something other people have done (as above, 
apply humor filter,) is there anything else I can do to help out the 
fedora-legacy project? I can analyze fixes, apply patches  and sling SRPMs 
around. I can also write documentation. If there's a need for QA, I can consider 
converting a server over to an unpopular release. (7.[12]? 8.0?). I 
imagine you have enough 7.3 capacity, though if that's not the case, I 
have one server running that release.

I can't remember if I gave a "self introduction" or not, so here goes. I 
have 18 years systems administration experience, starting on VAX/VMS in 
1986. I put my first Unix system, a Sun 4/110, together in 1989. I loaded 
Linux for the first time on a home PC in 1993 (Slackware with kernel 
0.9something, IIRC.). Linux has become increasingly important in my 
professional life since then, of course. I switched over to Red Hat at 
5.2, and I've pretty well stuck with them since. I'm currently supporting 
a large multinational's 7.3 based legacy Linux distro with security 
patches, working for another large multinational as a contractor to the 
first. I also do quite a bit of other work in the Linux line on the same 
project. My core specialty is systems administration tools.

For many years, I maintained "op", which is a sudo-like program. I 
recently wrote sudoscript (http://egbok.com/sudoscript) which is a system 
for auditing activity in a root shell using sudo(8) and script(1).
The first program is in C, and the second in Perl. I have lots of 
experience in both, though my Perl is much more current.

I'm a Linux enthusiast, as well as a Linux professional. I believe in Free 
Software, but I'm not a fanatic. Systems Administrators have to be 
practical about most things, mainly because they rarely have a choice 
about what their users will throw at them. 8)

If anyone took offense to my earlier postings, then I apologize. The flood 
of new fixes is impressive. I do think large lag times in releasing fixes 
is a problem for users depending on a service like this. But I'm  
volunteering to help out all I can to reduce turnaround. I can probably 
give five to ten hours a week.

Thanks for the useful service. As I've said before, the triage has been 
particularly helpful to me. Keep up the good work!

 -- 
Howard Owen                      "Even if you are on the right
EGBOK Consultants                 track, you'll get run over if you
hbo at egbok.com    +1-650-218-2216  just sit there." - Will Rogers