User:Fostermarkd
From ConShell
I am 39 years old and live with my wife and two children in Shoreline, Washington (USA), which is just north of Seattle. I am currently employed by BitPusher as a Senior Systems Engineer.
My first computer was Commodore 64 with (yep) a whopping 64KB of RAM. I was 13 years old & was hacking BASIC in no time. I dialed pirate bulletin boards (BBS) across the country and played door games in the wee hours, racking up a phone bill over $100 for which my parents made me sell my beloved electric guitar to pay for.
Please visit my homepage if you haven't yet been.
- Projects page
Projects and Research
Here are some of the projects I'm working on and technologies I'm in the process of using, learning or wanting to learn.
- Compiling Mediawiki Tips for those infrequent tasks.
- Investigating my personal power usage - going green to save money on electricity
- Learning Puppet (a CCCM alternative to CFEngine)
- Monitoring solutions using Cacti and Nagios - involves snmp, nrpe and rrdtool
- Building RPM packages for CentOS
- Encrypting my home folder to safeguard my laptop data.
- Trackers - use blackhole dns to filter sites (hosts/domains) that target your identity
- LinuxFest Northwest - I gave my DNS & Linux presentation 2007-Apr-28
- Virtualization stuff: Xen 3.0.2 and VMware server and ESX.
- Playing with the Firefly Media Server (aka. mt-daapd) on my home network to service my Roku Soundbridge M1000.
- iSCSI particularly for storage of virtual machine disks
- Implement web content filtering via WPAD & dansguardian - to help keep the little ones "safe".
Software Development
These are software projects I am involved in, either as a package maintainer, tester or developer. Not to be confused with the applications I just (ab)use.
- XCA - GUI for SSL/TLS certificate management.
- FreeBSD package maintainer
- Ubuntu packages available at my launchpad PPA and now available for REVU.
- dnstop - flexible monitoring tool for DNS traffic
- Scavenge - DNS auditing tool I wrote to help clean up my crufty DNS zones.
- iscsi-target
- FreeBSD package maintainer...based on NetBSD's implementation.
- mt-daapd
- FreeBSD package maintainer as of 2007-11-27 see Firefly Media Server for notes
- RPM Builder - setup notes for preparing a package build environment under CentOS or Red Hat
- FreeBSD Port Tips - notes for port maintainership
Other things under consideration: winff
Other pages of personal interest
Pages of general interest are better linked to from the HomePage
- Music that I'm into, and Favorite songs by bands I like
- Books, reading, read or want to.
- SysAdminTips
- Applications that I use a lot
- Benchmarks - of various systems I've owned or used.
- Video Antics - notes on encoding from DV, DVD to avi, iPOD and the like.
- FreeBSD
- Boredom Busters - activities to break out of boredom, depression, funks and what-have-you.
- Ideas, some stuff I come up with to do
- Some presentations I've given, mostly about DNS.
- For Sale
- Articles and Papers
- Ughlish - ruminations and what-not on the english language
- NodeTracker - deprecated. Someday I hope to replace it with something more modular that hooks into DHCP, DNS, Nagios and the like to provide holistic server management.
- Mailing Lists - these are the Internet mailing lists I subscribe to.
- Performance Troubleshooting
- Before I Die - lest I forget
- Registrars - ones I use or have considered



