Welcome Cornelius!

Here is a short interview with Cornelius, the newest contributor of the site. I have asked him a few questions so we can learn a few things about him. If you would like to ask Cornelius some other questions please feel free to use the comment form of this post. Here it goes:

Marius: Hi Cornelius! Welcome and thank you again for getting involved in this site. Let’s start first with some basic stuff… Tell us something about yourself.

Cornelius: Thanks for the warm welcome, Marius. I am Cornelius Rossmanith, 30 years old. I live in Germany in a small town near Frankfurt. Currently I am working for the Institute for Law and Finance in Frankfurt as Administrator for their small network. I have to take care of their Windows 2000 server, the corresponding workstations and their Linux webserver which I setup myself and is running CentOS 4. But I strongly tend to like more administrating a Linux machine.

Marius: Why Linux? What do you like about Linux?

Cornelius: From the technical side it’s not Linux in particular that I like more than Windows, it’s more the idea behind *NIX systems in general that I favor. There, the elegance comes to my mind. If you have understood the basic principles of *NIX systems, everything seems very logical to you. I am talking about file management and permissions for example. They’re easier to handle than under Windows and more powerful at the same time! Oh, and putting nearly everything in a central place like the registry in Windows wasn’t a smart move IMO. It’s easier to edit and backup single config files. If I look at your question in an abstract way, it’s very easy for me to answer it. With Linux I connect Open Source. I know, Open Source has been there before Linux, but with Linux Open Source gained popularity and so my attention, too. And to make it short: I like the idea of Open Source. Better security through Open Source software is just one argument of many.

Marius: What is your favorite Linux distribution and why do you prefer it over other distributions?

Cornelius: By now, my favorite Linux distribution is CentOS. But, I have to admit, this choice is made of pragmatism and maybe laziness. I was “learning” Linux on a Red Hat system, so I got used to that environment. When Red Hat dropped their support for RH9, I was very mad at Red Hat. I was running a small webserver and there was absolutely no need to upgrade to an enterprise level product. I even told them that I could buy a Windows Server license for that money… But anyway, I was on the edge of migrating to Debian because I knew that things like this could never happen there. Then I stumbled upon Whitebox Linux and I fell in love immediately! A Red Hat compatible system, “service”, “chkconfig”, “rpm”, everything I got used to was there. What would I want more? So I installed it and was happy, but after some months I chose to migrate to CentOS (very easy task from Whitebox) because of the bigger community and the faster availability of security patches. So I stick to CentOS now and I am very happy with it.

Marius: What kind of articles should we expect to see from you?

Cornelius: Hmm, hard to answer. Sometimes, when I setup software, it seems so easy when you just skip through the installation manual. But reality was often different for me. And these experiences I can share. Maybe people learn from them and save some time. OpenVZ is a good example. Got many time consuming problems with it that I had to master.

Marius: Thank you very much for your time. I hope that we will have a great collaboration and we will see some great posts from your side in the future.

Cornelius: I am looking forward to starting and I hope that people find my contributions as useful as yours.