Here can you see details about a some of my projects
kaltmacher.de
Since summer of 2006 I am a member of kaltmacher.de ( german pc hardware and cooling forum). After the owner changed in the year 2008, I applied as a forum moderator and was accepted. From summer 2009 till March 2012 I worked there as a forum and server administrator. At last, kaltmacher.de was running on a EQ4 server at hetzner.de, using KVM as a virtualization software and Debian Squeeze as base OS.
HammerLAN e.V.
Several friends and I organised our first public LAN-party at the beginning of 2008. We did it in cooperation with the school administration in our secondary school for ourself and 17 students. The party started at a friday midday and ended at the following sunday morning.
My friends and I helped a friendly association to organize a LAN-party in the end of 2008 - our first public event as a group. I was responsible for the hole electricity and provided most of the power equipment and also a part of the network gear. Our hall had several problems with the built-in power distribution, but based on my electricity allocation program and enough equipment I was able to handle several power outages. Additional to our power outages, we had a nonfunctional heating (22nd of November, freezing temperatures outside). Also based on the good allocation program we were able to heat up all important spots inside the hall with electric heaters. Many thanks are going out to Enrico Tonn and
Thomas Kaegi
for helping me with user support at the party.
After that party we wanted to found a registered association. While we informed ourself about law of associations, we organised in cooperation with the local youth welfare office and the 'Medienzentrum Hamm' (institution for teacher continued education) another LAN-party, but this time only for partens. My team and I were responsible for presenting an ego shooter (counter strike in that case). After the presentation the parents had the possibility to play by themselves and they had the chance to ask us questions about games, shooters and computer dependence.
We organised a convention for computer addicted people in the winter of 2010 in Hamm and in the summer of 2011 in Karlsruhe. After that we founded our registered association -
HammerLAN e.V.
. I got voted to the first chairman (and won the following reelections). Shortly after the founding, we planned and realised our first own LAN-party. We just had to rent a single network switch, we provided the rest of the equipment by ourselfs. The party was a big success and we had 30 happy visitors.
Linux
My addiction to computers in general and to linux in particular started in the spring of 2007. It started with a second computer that should be added to my family house network. We only had a modem connection so it was impossible to use the internet simultaneously with two computers. My dad bought a router from Linksys, but it was so crappy that I had to thought about alternatives. I was googling through the internet and found an
article about IPCop
. I was really surprised about the idea to build a router based on an old PC. Lucky me, I had 12 computers at home so I was able to test IPCop including most of the features. Based on the lack of a suitable computer case I had to place the IPCop inside a weak carton. Unfortunately the hardware got destroyed by a friend a few weeks after the commissioning. I was so frustrated about the faulty hardware that I lost the interest about IPCop, but I was eagerly interested about Linux.
After fighting a few years with dirty Windows XP problems, many bluescreens and a bunch of faulty hardware (started around 2005) I got bored in the summer holidays 2007. I was looking for new challenges and remembered my experience with IPCop. I didn't want to work with IPCop itself again, but I informed myself about Linux and found the distribution Debian. I met Jan Krüger from
kaltmacher.de
and he helped me to get started with Debian. The prejudices 'A bit old, good for beginners and almost impossible to destroy' about Debian have existed for many years and as I am still using it I can say that they are true. After many experiments in the following 6 months I was able to administrate a complete LAMP stack. I was looking for further challenges and found
http://root-und-kein-plan.ath.cx
. It took me a few days to think about an own rootserver but finally I bought a small one based on an Intel Atom CPU from OVH. The operating system was Debian, the server served a few gameservers, a complete LAMP stack and a web based proxy.
Every teacher and every student (including me) at my old school hated the bad (and nonfunctional) censorship inside the school network. It was impossible to work normal with the internet, half of wikipedia was blocked but every torrent tracker and one click hoster was working, even a few erotic paysites. Based on the unbelievably bad support from HITS (responsible company for the censorship) we had to help ourself and most of the students and teachers started to use my webproxy.
By the time had the atom server more and more jobs to do so I was looking for alternatives. I tested several hosting companies in germany and in foreign countries, had complete anonymous servers and big professional hardware. Also I managed several servers for friends with a wide variety of applications. In the sommer of 2009 I got responsible for hosting kaltmacher.de so I looked again for a new server. I found a suitable one at
Hetzner Online
and hosted the site there until March 2012.
In November of 2011 a friend and I were responsible for planning, building and administrating a high availability cluster for a LAMP stack, we used the following software:
Gentoo - as OS for the hypervisors
Debian Squeeze - OS inside the VMs
KVM - as hypervisor
Heartbeat/Pacemaker - management for clusterressources
DRBD - distributed storage
HAProxy - our Loadbalancer
Memcached - central and redundant handling of PHP sessions
Right now my interests are mostly based on KVM/libvirt and their optimization, building clusters (loadbalancing/HA), IPv6 and using Debian, Gentoo and CentOS as operating systems.