About Me and This Site

My Background

My name is Charles Auer and I live in the United States. I am currently working toward getting my Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology with a concentration on the security side of things.

My first experience with Linux was with RedHat 6.2 back in 2002 or 2003, but I don't really remember all that much about it except that I was very confused when trying to use it and how I got frustrated easily.

In 2007, I took a Linux class in college and got a bit more familiar with the terminal and the different commands that existed. During that class, I primarily used Pink Tie Linux, which was based off of RedHat, but I do not think it is still around.

Around that time I had a file server set up using a spare machine running Windows XP and sharing files off an external USB 2.0 hard drive. I had that setup for quite a few years, but eventually decided that I wanted to try a server-class OS on that machine. My reasoning behind the move was mainly due to the slow transfer speeds and lack of features Windows XP had when used as a server. At the time, I was trying to decide between running either a full blown Windows Server OS or a version of Linux. After comparing the pros and cons of each, I decided to give Linux a shot.

My first experience with Ubuntu was around the time 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) was released, and that started off as a desktop install serving files via Samba from the same USB drive I used on the XP machine. As time progressed, I went from using the GUI via VNC to using Webmin and finally to not bothering with a GUI just using SSH to manage the server.

The old desktop I originally installed 9.04 on was recycled when I upgraded to a dual core Pentium and added a RAID array to increase the storage capacity of the server in order accommodate the media I wanted to stream locally. That machine ran Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit at the time, but now it has taken over the role of my spare desktop because once I got into virtualization the a dual core was not cutting it any more. My newest server is running an i7 2600K at 3.40 GHz with 16GB of RAM and Debian Wheezy 64-bit. It was running Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) 64-bit previously, but I have moved from using VirtualBox to using Proxmox as my virtualization solution, so I needed to move from Ubuntu to Debian for that to work.

As far as the server goes, it was running a RAID5 array on a RocketRAID 2640x1 card using three 2TB Hitatchi drives which had been running since the latter part of 2009. During June of 2013, the array started throwing errors and I decided to replace it in it's entirety and upgraded to a MegaRAID 9260-8i controller and five 3TB Western Digital SE drives in a RAID6. The speed difference between the old array and the new array is just mind blowing.

My primary desktop is a Windows 7 machine, and my secondary desktop is running Fedora 18 (Gnome 3 DE), but I am usually running a few flavors of Linux in virtual machines on either box.

My Site

I created this site because I wanted to have a place where I could post my scripts, tutorials and whatnot. You will find a few shell scripts as well as some tutorials here. I originally coded this site with Bluefish using XHTML-strict and CSS 2.1 specifications on Ubuntu 10.04. I have now finished recoding the site in HTML5 and CSS 3 using Dreamweaver, but the majority of the site is still hand coded.

Most of the tutorials you will find here were written for Ubuntu but they can be used on Debian with minimal changes. I also have some tutorials that are for CentOS, which can be easily transferred to Fedora or RedHat (and their derivatives).