User:Redbeard

Brian 'redbeard' Harrington
Personal information
Location:	Los Angeles, CA
Homepage:	brianredbeard.com
E-mail:	redbeard@fedoraproject.org
GPG key:	933F54083D6DF566
Contact information
	#coreos,#etcd,#openbmc,#riscv ​
Fedora-specific information
FAS name:	redbeard
Fedora e-mail:	redbeard@fedoraproject.org
Fedora homepage:	redbeard.fedorapeople.org

Brian 'redbeard' Harrington

About

I'm a Linux curmudgeon who tends to fight with servers until the bend to my will. I've been involved with Linux since the ~2.1 Kernel, though to be quite honest, I had very little idea what I was doing until about 2.4. It was a very exciting moment when I backed up my machine and moved to Slackware 8.

I cut my teeth working at an ISP and from there branched out into systems administration. I remember vividly being brought into the CTOs office of said ISP:

"Brian, How would you like to be a systems administrator?"

I sat for a moment considering the offer. I hadn't really considered this up to this point. It took me a moment to respond.

"Well, that's very flattering... but I've been doing a lot coming in to help with a lot of the network maintenance. I've done a bunch of the firmware upgrades on the Juniper M5 & M10 routers. I've also handled a lot of the circuit provisioning for our T1 customers and some of the same in the ATM cloud for our DSL customers. I think I'd prefer to follow on and become a network engineer."

At this point he made the power triangle/steeple with his fingers.

"Brian, How would you like to be a systems administrator?"

It was at this point it was pretty obvious there was only one path forward. Systems administration it is.

Current Work

I'm a technology strategist within the CTO organization of Red Hat specializing in RISC-V and emerging technologies.

Past Work

I'm was one of the early employees at CoreOS where I managed the SRE team before taking on the role of chief architect. I am a huge advocate of both FL/OSS and Linux and help promote this through development work, public presentations, etc. One of my proudest moments is looking through the offices at CoreOS and seeing the majority of our staff running Linux on their laptops (many of them running Fedora).

Before that I was previously a member of the platform consulting team at Red Hat. I spent many years on the team travelling all over the world and was a subject matter expert on Security, IPA/IdM, Performance Tuning, OpenStack, and OpenShift. When I joined the company there were about 2000 employees. It was quite a treat to sit through my orientation shoulder to shoulder with Michael Cunningham (now General Counsel at Red Hat) and that says a lot about the culture there. Each person brings something to the table and just because someone is in Legal (or Finance, Brand, etc) it doesn't mean they should be sequestered from everyone else. It was a great place to work.

Linux Systems

Unless otherwise stated, I generally am running Fedora on my laptops & desktop, and Flatcar on my servers (Sorry Atomic!).