So not much has changed employment-wise in the last year+ that has gone by. =:\ I think that’s a good thing.

I’m still working for Rite Aid. For the last year or so, I’ve taken on the lead-developer role for Rite Aid in their Internet/Intranet environment. I’ve had some really great opportunities in that role. I’ve lead my team in throwing out a really old, crappy frame-based *shudder*, NT-driven, antiquated web site that Rite Aid’s had up for at least 2 years. I’ve architected and implemented the first production Linux solution that Rite Aid has ever used–a fault-tolerant web environment that utilizes balanced clustering as well as director-level failover. And that was REALLY fun. =:) And the kicker is–we did it for just about zero cost. The individual nodes are 5-year-old desktop machines that you’d just as soon throw out the door with any other operating system.

My first choice for this was FreeBSD. You simply cannot beat FreeBSD’s speed and performance with Linux–especially on older hardware like this. But FreeBSD gurus are rather few and far-between at my company. My second choice was debian, since it is by far the best long-term Linux distribution. But not that many people are familiar with debian either. So I chose the at-the-time-most stable Linux distro that had a big-enough name behind it as to inspire confidence in those who maintain the boxes themselves. Hey–at least they’re Linux. =:)

Since we put my little Linux servers into production, we’ve had absolutely ZERO downtime due to the servers (network problems are not my problem =:). And it’s been exciting to see Linux make serious business-need/solution inroads in other areas of Rite Aid since then.

I am currently still working with the Internet/Intranet environment for Rite Aid, and am Systems Administrator of Rite Aid’s Internet development servers. They’re debian XFS-filesystem-based boxen, of course. =;) I maintain several large CVS repositories for the team, as well as manage routine server maintenance, hardware/software/network configuration, a decently-large Oracle 8.1.6.1 development database, and do some of the meanest PHP/Perl/Apache coding around (can you spell obfuscation?). =:)

It will be interesting to see where we go from here….

Okay, bye.