PaulNasrat

I'm a sysadmin/coder formerly at ConneXtra, I've seen the benefits of DoingIt :)

I'm interested in computer immunity and agile systems administration using XP like methodologies.

• Test first. Vmware/bochs/virtualisation is your friend. You can modify small parts of the system and run your tests. Also good for functional testing.
• Small components. Package management is essential, choose something that works for you. I know rpm very well as a packaging format, it's a policy based thing. Use tools such as apt-get, urpmi, current/up2date to maintain policy. Control the flow of packages into the system (prevent rpm hell). Learn to build your own. Have also done Solaris packages, etc.
• continuous integration - have automated installers (kickstart, jumpstart, ant scripts), constantly merge updates (either as a post install or as a living tree - again policy decision), make sure new/old servers are in sync.

Probably of most use to people is my work on JPackage project which create rpms of java stuff. I've recently packaged MockObjects, I'm working on JunitEE at the moment, then probably XDoclet

http://pauln.truemesh.com/

• Editor - vim
• Mail - mutt
• desktop - currently gnome 2 and metacity or Quartz/OS X
• Languages - perl, python, java, c, a touch of x86 asm (and I mean a touch), shell (bash, korn, csh).
• Projects - ELKS Psion 3 port and housekeeping http://elks.sf.net, current http://current.tigris.org, JPackage http://www.jpackag.org/