Introduction

This blog is about system administration for small to medium-sized businesses. I intend to publish IT-related discoveries from time to time. These discoveries will be either on the hard skills of sysadmin, such as Unix/Microsoft network integration, or on soft skills, such as processes inspired by what I am learning in ITIL(tm), user relations, Service Level Agreements, and keeping sane.

This is not a blog that is meant to be kept up daily, although of course that might change. It is more of a reference for myself or anyone who Googles for answers to problems I hit before they do.

I don't pretend to have the discovery skills of the other technical bloggers on the Web, of whom there are dozens if not hundreds. As I suspect most sysadmins do, I rely on these generous bloggers for my successes at work. Perhaps I can furnish some answers too, or at least popularize them to make for easy geek reading.

I should establish some geek cred, mind.

• I've remained in system administration - junior, intermediate and now senior - for seventeen years in small and medium-sized businesses, always in tech or academia.
• My home-built arcade machine is in the basement.
• My beloved wife and mother of my children complains about the sheer number of gadgets, Macs, Windows-based PCs and Linux boxen in the corners, tables and bedside tables.
• I am writing this on an Acer Aspire 1430-6436 on a US + French Canadian keyboard even if I haven't ripped out the HDD to replace it with an SSD (those are in my Lenovo at home and my Dell at work). 
• My gasket-blowing is now limited to a handful a year, thanks to publications by David Allen and Stephen Covey.
• I claim a certain amount of sysadmin expertise on Linux and Windows, with some Mac on the side.
• I am slowly converting to the FreeBSD side of the house for its ease of admin.