Michael Crilly

The new guy to the Wiki.

I have a keen interest in automation and web service delivery. I've spent most of my life on the Internet, providing services in the form of IRC, FTP(S), HTTP(S), DNS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, and more. I love the concept of managing servers and making them as secure and efficient as possible (hence why FreeBSD is becoming my go to OS solution.)

Key technologies I use daily include:

• Terraform
• Ansible
• Packer
• Various CI/CD solutions
• AWS, GCP, Azure, …
• Python and Go
• Linux (and a bit of FreeBSD)

And whatever else is needed to get the job done.

We're currently investigating the possibility of creating a high level guide that introduces a user to FreeBSD. This guide would be designed to challenge the user to install and try FreeBSD over a seven day period. It's designed to walk the user through all processes and guide them on how-to implement common solutions (such as a desktop environment.) This work would also be designed to come before the Handbook, which would remain a technical manual/reference.

The 7DC will be based around a few core concepts:

• Getting user onboard with FreeBSD quickly
• Walking users through common FreeBSD use cases, such as desktop environments
• Allowing administrators and engineers to quickly solve real-world production problems
• Make FreeBSD more visible and accessible to all

FreeBSD is an excellent platform to build out a production server environment. It also makes for a great desktop environment. Whatever the use case is we want people to understand FreeBSD well enough to achieve their goals with as little friction as possible. The 7DC will have people running with FreeBSD quickly.

The idea we're currently developing revolves around the concept of a seven day challenge:

1. Installation
2. User Management
3. The Filesystem
4. Permissions
5. Package Management
6. A Desktop Environment
7. Maintenance

Each day individually would constitute between one and two hours of work. By the end of the seven day challenge the user should have a functioning desktop environment they can begin to manage and grow to their liking.

After the initial seven days are done, the user can then take on more goal orientated challenges. At present these include, but are certianly not limited to:

• Golang Development Environment
• Nginx and WordPress Blog
• NodeJS Development Environment
• PostgreSQL Database Server
• HAProxy Load Balancer
• Managing A Server with Ansible
• Traefik Load Balancer

More ideas are welcome.

• FreeBSD and Ansible
• Using FreeBSD in the Enterprise

• Email: mike@opsfactory.com.au
• IRC: movedx @ Freenode (#freebsd[-social,wiki])