The year was 1994, I was in Medicine Hat College in Alberta starting my 1st year of university transfer program. The name Linux pops up during a chat with the sysadmin. I'd been exposed to UNIX (NCR mini) in computer processing class when I redo high school in Clareshome, AB. During my 1st year in MedHat, I read all UNIX books I can find in the library and decided that UNIX is the way of the future. Because of this, I was excited to hear that I can run a UNIX-like OS on my 386 with 8MB of RAM. Yeah! It will be heaven on earth. But school works, and the idea of getting a 30 disks Slackware kept me away from Linux until later....

After I moved to Calgary the next year, the wonderful CDROM drive is cheap enough so I can afford one. I bought a set of Walnut Creek CDROM and install Slackware on my 386. The installation isn't flawless and I have to re-install many times to get it to work the way I want it, but it's fun. Since then, I moved to Redhat (my 1st set of RH 4.0 was actually ordered over the Internet) and found it even more fun!

Then Linux changed my life. It was summer of 1996, I finished my 2nd year in the University of Calgary and looking for job in the internship program to get some work experience and extra bucks to support school. I started late and most of the jobs are gone... until a guy named Mark Lord from BNR in Ottawa called one day. We chatted for a while and he mentioned that he need a co-op student to work for him to take care of some servers and he saw my resume stated I have Linux experience (even it's just for a year), which is the key asset he's looking for in his candidates. It turned out that Mark is a kernel hacker (the Linux IDE guy). I was hired and started working in October. The story didn't just end there....

3 days after I started with BNR, Mark left BNR. It looks like a disaster at the beginning, but it's not. Since no one in the department know much about Linux and no staff to spare on the task. I'm suddenly in charge of all the Linux terminal servers and a departmental web server that run 24/7. This is sure a big responsibility to rest on a co-op student with one year of Linux experience, but I got to be my own boss and learn anything I want/need to keep up with my work. I have to deal with s/w designers having trouble with the Linux servers, and the weekly NIS/DNS outage in the lab. But I also got to do many other cool stuffs with Linux. The world is wonderful. You learn, you work, and you got paid.

Now I'm graduated from the university and back to Nortel (Yes, BNR had since changed to Nortel and now Nortel "Networks"). I'm sure Linux open me the door that I could not have done it by myself, and I'm glad I'm still running Linux anywhere I can.

The world is even more wonderful.

So, I finished migrating from my AMD K6-2 to Duron, it rocks... only if I get the 11g card working

Yes, I just got Fedora Core 1 installed on the Duron 950 and migrated the old server to the new machine. Now, I just need to got this machine stablized (ie install SMC EZconnectG driver) then I'll start playing on new environement.

So, I've been thinking about upgrading my home server that already act as mail server, web server, time server, and NAT router/switch. I probably going to move the setup to my Duron 950 and run the new Fedora core 1.

Then the fun begins, I plan to try out more cool applications on the new platform, such as:

• Add a fax modem and install voice mail/messaging server, with a web interface that allow me to listen to it over the web
• Add a web cam module, maybe w/ remote control to turn the camera from the web
• Put a WML server to allow me to connect to my server via my cellphone. Maybe I can post to this blog over that link! It turns out I can do it from Apache by adding new media type wml, so now I can put up WAP pages!
• Try out PVR function, able to record TV and compress it to mpg, then stream it over LAN
• VoIP gateway w/ SIP/H.323, allow me to a make a out-going local call from my server via the modem
• Send SMS to my cellphone on the event of system reboot, new mail, and other interesting/disastrous events

Too much to do, too little time.