About Me
Welcome to my site...My name is John Holbrook and I'm a Linux Geek. I live in Penticton BC Canada which, in my slightly biased opinion, is one of the most beautiful places in the world.
My Linux experience:
Installed my first Linux box on an old 486 about 6 years ago. I believe it was Redhat 6.0. I can still remember staring at the little "DOS" text screen wondering "Okay what the hell do I do next?"
Since then I've done the following:
- Built a dozen or so secured, locked down, internet servers with the following software
- Apache 1.3 and 2.x
- modsecurity
- mod_dosevasive
- mod_rewrite
- Qmail (Love Qmail)
- Postfix
- BIND
- GRSecurity Kernel Patch
- OpenSSH
- MySQL
- PHP4 and PHP5
- Shorewall firewall
- Portsentry
- Custom built monolithic kernels (both 2.4 and 2.6)
- Logcheck
- Customized backup scripts
- etc
- Built several DNS servers for intranet usage
- Built a Squid Proxy box with built in ad blocking, etc
- Built a DSPAM box with:
- Postfix
- 4 AV products scanning all incoming email
- DSPAM filtering for spam
- Several rules built into Postfix to deny accepting a lot of spam
- Blocking of most dangerous files based on attachment types
- Samba - Have a fair amount of experience installing and configuring Samba to integrate with AD
- FreeNX - Set up a few FreeNX servers
I like to build secured and locked down boxes with a bare minimum of services running.
Distros that I've used:
- Redhat (from 6.0 to 7.2 primarily)
- Openna (Great secured distro. Unfortunately, development has ceased on it)
- Suse (mostly on the desktop)
- Gentoo
- Debian
- Mandrake/Mandriva (again mostly on desktop)
- Ubuntu and Kubuntu
I live to play with technology. I'm currently trying to learn about the following:
- Ruby
- FreeBSD - Really looking at it because I want to start using SGUIL
- FreeNX - more in depth knowledge
Also have extensive experience with Windows both on the desktop and server, Citrix, Novell Netware, Groupwise, Sonicwall firewalls, etc.
Certifications
I have my MCSE in Windows NT4.
I have also completed 2 Gold Certifications with SANS -
- GSEC - GIAC Security Essentials Certification
- GCFW - GIAC Certified Firewall Analyst
I just completed a Silver Certification -
- GSNA - GIAC Systems and Network Auditor
Update for September 16, 2007 -
- GCIH - GIAC Certified Incident Handler
If I think of anything else, I'll add it here.