Yangraham A.k.a Brian Graham
I have been using Fedora since almost the beginning. I have now got involved in implimenting Fedora systems into local businesses, not bad considering I work for a Microsoft Distributor :-) But on the whole the industry is seeing a shift to Linux based resources mainly due to the ease of licensing and the lower total cost of ownership. I would like to contribute more to the project which has become my right arm when it comes to I.T systems.
I am a Senior Technical Manager at a small I.T company, we act as travelling Administrators to about 400 companies across the U.K. well I did until I moved into the office!!! Now I am more involved with specifying servers, O.S. choices and telephone support at 4th line.
- 2011 Update
Well I have quit my job in the middle of a credit crisis! Reason being that my boss did not see Linux in the workplace. So I have set up my own limited company www.it-mk.co.uk and yes we are a registered partner of Microsoft. However it puts my in a great position to spread the word and get Fedora and RedHat into small business.
I have found the extra challenge of setting up a comapny at this time a real challenge, however we are now in fiscal year two and things are starting to pick up so fingers crossed we will be in a great position once the markets pick up again.
Anyway remember to check us out and support a fellow linux guy :-)www.it-mk.co.uk for Great Small Business Technical Support!If you have any questions please drop me a line.
September 2011
New business is going well,credit crunch has not claimed us yet! Really enjoying the challenges and giving me a great opportunity to soread the word about Fedora and Linux in general. It is nice to be able to offer something different to busineses and I do love the look on an MD or CEO's face when they realise there is no license fee!!! Perfect for struggling small businesses in a credit crisis :-)
Plans For Fedora
I will continue to spread the word about Fedora to Small Business throughout the UK. I am also happy to help out at shows and presentations, hopefully I will get the chance to organise something myself as well. I am already supporting Fedora by making information about the Fedora Project and indeed Red Hat to local businesses. This has included numerous implimentations.
I am currently in the process of moving some of my spare personal domains across to a new Fedora fired data center, this is proving to provide me with ample opportunity to get down and technical with Fedora on an administative / engineering level.
Corporate usage of Fedora, we (my company) are implimenting Fedora systems on a nationwide basis, these are being used as "Disaster Recovery Servers" basically this entails them having massive hard disk drives and storing Images currently created in a third party windows application, of the servers on site. If something happens then we can quickly recover the data, or indeed full server to different hardware within a very short space of time. This is working really well. I am currently looking into how we can have a massive fedora box here which will have no other purpose other than using Rsync to sync the images back here for off site backup.
I would love to hear from anyone who has used a similar system, also if there is anyway to speed up the rsync process as an 80Gb image file takes an age to sync over xDSL! :-S
Hey guys, just a quick update - I have since quit my job, that's why the updates have been a little quiet on here. I have now taken the position of Managing Director at a Small IT company based in Bletchley, Milton Keynes www.it-mk.co.uk and have not looked back since, and yes we are now a 100% fedora based company, servers, workstations everything. So have a look at the website and drop us line for a chat sometime :-)
Fedora 10 Mail Server Completed
I have now completed the installation of my Fedora Mail server! Dual Core, 4Gb RAM, 1Tb Hard Disk, it rocks :-) I have found using the spamassassin milter with the clamav milter provides good results. I am using Dovecot to provide Imap services and Sendmail for the incoming SMTP feed. The whole thing just works! A refreshing change in todays world.
I found clamav very easy to install and to update using cron and freshclam. The configuration fo sendmail was something I was not looking forward to but it only took about 15 minutes. Everything was so easy to do.
Training Update
I am currently running a free in house 5 week training course on Fedora for my company. This is going to entail the usual installation, configuration things and also a few fun bits too, more to demonstrate the versatility of Fedora as an OS. I am looking to roll this course out to become a public course. I am currently intalks with local venue providers, libraries etc. To find a way to provide this course free of charge. The course will be asically 5 weeks for 2 hours one night per week.
1st Week -- Open Source Overview / Installation -- Completed
We managed to cover: The roots of Linux / Red Hat / Fedora Why use Linux? The open source license agreement types How the disk is organised and which partitions are created and why Full install Yum update Yum Install xxx
2nd Week -- Command Line, Samba File and Printer Sharing
3rd Week -- Mail Server / Mail Client overview / configuration
4th Week -- AntiVirus and Antispam overview / Configuration
5th Week -- Administration and Questions Answered
I will update once I have avenue. Also I will try and upload some pictures of he course in action.
I have now completed the training course at three different places and it has been really well received each time. Themain thing people ask me is "How can this be free!".
Contact Info
- e-mail: yangraham@fedoraproject.org