Who am I
I have been system administrator for over 15 years and I am strong supporter of open source software. I started playing around with various Linux distributions(Red Hat, Mandrake, Gentoo, etc) in High School. I was fortunate that my High School offered a Cisco Networking Academy that prepared students to take the Cisco Certified Network Associate(CCNA) exam, which I did. With that certification and the experience I had gained I was able to get some summer jobs as an IT Assistant(mainly for MS Windows) and gain more experience as a system administrator. I studied Computer Science at the University of Tennessee and at the same time work as a Student System Administrator in the Computer Science department on Labstaff. Labstaff was a game changing experience which allowed students to get real world linux/unix system administration experience running the departments servers(web, email, file servers, workstations, etc). This oppurtunity, along with the CS and coding knowlege I got from classes, allowed me combine my basic system administration skills and my linux hobby into a career as a Linux System Administrator.
I am currently employed as a HPC System Administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN(near Knoxville). I work in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility where our mission is to deploy the some of the worlds largest supercomputers to help solve some of the worlds hardest scientific problems. Most of the research done on our HPC resources is considered open science, where anyone from around the world(mainly universities and other national laboratories) who has a big problem to solve can use our computers for free as long as they publish their work in the public domain.
As time allows I also enjoy the occasional programming project and contributing to open source software. My non-computer hobbies consist of Swimming, Biking, Running, and doing long-distance triathlons.
Why did I create this site
The purpose of this site is to give me place to share useful information and work that I have done related to system administration, linux, open source software, and technology in general for the benifit of others in the field to learn from.
How did I create this site
After many failed attempts of trying to customize and manage popular content management systems such as Wordpress and Drupal to my liking, I wanted to try a different approach that would lead to more easily usable and maintainable site. So my requirements were this: - Able to write/store/manage site content via a git repository and text editor. No more database backends or CMS administration web GUIs. - A templating language that can generate static content. No more deluge of security updates for features I never use. - Ability to easily customize, theme, structure the site to my liking.
Given all that I decided to use Pelican as my static site generator, becuase it seemed to have all the features I needed, was based on python(which I like to code in), and was actively maintained. I am currently using the pelican-bootstrap3 theme.
How do I host this site
For simplicity sake, I am currently using github.io or Github Pages to host the static content for my site. The source code for my site is in a seperate github repo https://github.com/scootersmk/scott-koch.com. This allows me to host the site entirely for free, easily share the source and content for the site, and not have to maintain my own web server.