Marius: Hi Cornelius! Welcome and thank you again for getting involved in this site. Let’s start first with some basic stuff… Tell us something about yourself.

Cornelius: Thanks for the warm welcome, Marius. I am Cornelius Rossmanith, 30 years old. I live in Germany in a small town near Frankfurt. Currently I am working for the Institute for Law and Finance in Frankfurt as Administrator for their small network. I have to take care of their Windows 2000 server, the corresponding workstations and their Linux webserver which I setup myself and is running CentOS 4. But I strongly tend to like more administrating a Linux machine.

Marius: Why Linux? What do you like about Linux?

Cornelius: From the technical side it’s not Linux in particular that I like more than Windows, it’s more the idea behind *NIX systems in general that I favor. There, the elegance comes to my mind. If you have understood the basic principles of *NIX systems, everything seems very logical to you. I am talking about file management and permissions for example. They’re easier to handle than under Windows and more powerful at the same time! Oh, and putting nearly everything in a central place like the registry in Windows wasn’t a smart move IMO. It’s easier to edit and backup single config files.
If I look at your question in an abstract way, it’s very easy for me to answer it. With Linux I connect Open Source. I know, Open Source has been there before Linux, but with Linux Open Source gained popularity and so my attention, too. And to make it short: I like the idea of Open Source. Better security through Open Source software is just one argument of many.

Marius: What is your favorite Linux distribution and why do you prefer it over other distributions?

Cornelius: By now, my favorite Linux distribution is CentOS. But, I have to admit, this choice is made of pragmatism and maybe laziness. I was “learning” Linux on a Red Hat system, so I got used to that environment. When Red Hat dropped their support for RH9, I was very mad at Red Hat. I was running a small webserver and there was absolutely no need to upgrade to an enterprise level product. I even told them that I could buy a Windows Server license for that money… But anyway, I was on the edge of migrating to Debian because I knew that things like this could never happen there. Then I stumbled upon Whitebox Linux and I fell in love immediately! A Red Hat compatible system, “service”, “chkconfig”, “rpm”, everything I got used to was there. What would I want more? So I installed it and was happy, but after some months I chose to migrate to CentOS (very easy task from Whitebox) because of the bigger community and the faster availability of security patches. So I stick to CentOS now and I am very happy with it.

Marius: What kind of articles should we expect to see from you?

Cornelius: Hmm, hard to answer. Sometimes, when I setup software, it seems so easy when you just skip through the installation manual. But reality was often different for me. And these experiences I can share. Maybe people learn from them and save some time. OpenVZ is a good example. Got many time consuming problems with it that I had to master.

Marius: Thank you very much for your time. I hope that we will have a great collaboration and we will see some great posts from your side in the future.

Cornelius: I am looking forward to starting and I hope that people find my contributions as useful as yours.

During the last weeks after I have published my 100th post on this site I have received many encouraging mails from peoples that found this site useful and helped them in some way. I would like to thank them all. I really appreciate that you have taken the time to write a few words of encouragement. I will try my best to continue this site in the same way and follow the ideas that I have started it: to help other peoples by documenting some of the challenges I have faced during my linux sysadmin work. Besides the peoples that have sent me encouragement mails there were also a few that have expressed their interest to get involved and help me by writing articles from their own experience. I was very excited by this and hopefully soon you will see posted also articles from other authors than myself. This was delayed a little because I wanted to know personally everyone that will post articles on the site, so I had various skype/telephne discussions with them. Once I liked the person and felt we are talking the same ‘language’ we have moved forward with this. In the beginning I will moderate the articles (and help with whatever I can from my experience if needed), but hopefully shortly they will start publishing directly their posts.

I believe that the addition of contributions from other peoples is a very important step in this blog’s life. I hope that it will be a good and interesting change that will bring more diversity and different ideas from other peoples to the site. I am really excited about this and looking forward to see it live (you should expect to see the first posts in the next weeks).

Again thank you very much to all the peoples that have send me emails and also all my respect to the peoples that are even going to get involved into this by actively helping me to build this site.

Thank you,
- Marius -