What they're using: Tom Limoncelli

I first met Tom Limoncelli on a cold January day in Burlington, Vermont where he was a volunteer geek at the Howard Dean campaign headquarters. I was extremely impressed not only by his technical know-how, but by his real-world wisdom about where technology and humanity intersect.

At the time Tom was coming out with his first book, The Practice of System and Network Administration, co-written with Christine Hogan. Since then he has also written Time Management for System Administrators for O'Reilly.

These days Tom works as a System Administration Manager for Google in New York. While he wrangles many platforms, he remains a devoted Linux user and advocate. Here's how he runs down what he's using right now:

The bumper sticker on my car reads, "My other computer is a massive Linux cluster!". It's true. At Google we use massive clusters of Linux boxes for our web services and nearly everything else too. (The actual number of computers is a company secret). Once I used MapReduce (Google's parallel scheduling system) just to copy a database (each machine copied less than 1% of the total rows). In our remote offices we deploy small Xen clusters and manage them with Ganeti (a package we recently open-sourced). The Xen clusters run Ubuntu, as does my desktop and one of my laptops. My phone runs Android, which is also Linux.

Since all my data is on servers, I can do all my work with an SSH client and a web browser. My documents are all in web-based office applications, thanks to "Gears" they work whether or not I'm connected to the network. My preferred SSH client is OpenSSH with an old school xterm, but Mac OS X's Terminal app is winning me over. My favorite web browser is Chrome, but I use Firefox as a close second. When I use Windows I immediately install Cygwin's OpenSSH and rxvt to reduce the pain.

I co-wrote my first book using vim, CVS, make, and teTeX. My next book was written using vim and Subversion. Now I'm moving everything to Git. Even for solo projects I can't live without a source code repository on safe, backup'd, server.

I couldn't live without screen, rsync, wget and curl. I think more system administrators should use make to maintain servers as I described in TM4SA. I program in Python at work, Perl at home, and awk so much it makes younger sysadmins cry. I also love cat, tee, sed, grep, bc, mount, man, date, cal, ftp and ping... but doesn't everyone?

When people ask me, "When will Linux be usable by a typical grandmother?" I reply, "She uses Linux every time she uses Google! So there!"

You can keep up with Tom at his blog, EverythingSysadmin.com.

- Doc Searls