User:Richardpitt

Although I don't do system administration as my main activity, I do enough of it, and have done for so long, that many people think that's all I do.

In reality I'm a marketing and sales manager at heart but my major customer base in the past several years has been centered around active web sites - Web 2.0 - lead primarily by Geeklog and phpBB but including a number of other facilities, all of which are open source.

You'll find my business at www.pacdat.net, my personal info at richard.pacdat.net, my blog at blog.pacdat.net

I've run my own servers since long before the internet rose to public fame - and continue to do so today. On them are a small number of low-profile clients and an even smaller number of fairly high-profile ones (those with hundreds of thousands to millions of page-views/month). All are Linux, although I've been known to use Windows Media Server for its very specific facilities only.

Today I'm dealing a lot with multi-media and very much with user-generated content. Some of the sites have thousands of members with a tremendous amount of activity daily.

In general I'm of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy - and tend to have fewer rather than more features turned on to keep things simple. I have several co-administrators culled from the masses of members as well as a cadre of moderators found and trained in the same way.

I have (sole) root authority over the machines the sites are hosted on, and don't use system helpers such as cpanel or Plesk. The command line is my workbench.

My own workstation has 5 monitors on it and is an AMD phenom quad-core. The system could take 4 PCI-X (dual-head) video cards but only has 3 at this time :) I have so many other computers in the house that the local building inspectors once thought I had a grow-op due to the amount of electricity I use. These mostly contain video archives from the live streaming eagle nest cameras from the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, an organization I helped found with my good friend David Hancock, when this strange phenomenum of watching eagles raise their young took off in 2006.