There have been quite a few new members joining the forums lately and announcing their arrival. While we encourage this it is somewhat of a burden to weed through all of the "Introduction" threads. Therefore, we have created this sticky thread for you. Here you can let us know that you have joined the "SM Gang" and a little bit about yourself. Please include anything you would like to let us get to know you better.

Nobody likes to be first, so I'll start this off.

I became a Planet customer back in April of last year and then moved over to Server Matrix. I live in New Haven, Connecticut and run a web hosting company ( http://www.olternit.com/ ) with servers from ServerMatrix and a company in New York City, New York. I post on forums for fun, to learn new things, and to pass the time. My favorite color is blue.

I came to this forum in October, ordered my first server last month.
Still going fine

Escaped started in 1999 with servers at home on a DSL connection. To better provide for customers, a dedicated server was acquired in December of 2001. We moved up to a PIII 1GHz in June of 2002, then to a Celeron 1.7GHz toaster oven in December of 2002 until June of 03 when we get a superserver 2.4 from ServerMatrix. Currently, we have a co-located machine at The Planet and a dedicated server at ServerMatrix.

I have worked at Anheuser-Busch since April of 2001, and am sorry to say that the 23rd of this month will be my last day here, as I am moving to another state.

This place is a cool place to make professional acquintances and friends, and a cool place to kick back and talk.

Started at Sm at the very end of July. Droped my colo box off before cpl started
Bought a celeron server in Nov. Couldn't be happier.

I enjoy eating chicken.
I like the color blue and grey.
I have linux on my servers, Of the gentoo kind.
I'm expanding my game hosting company to VA, in Jan.

Well, I will take a shot at this myself. I along with my company made the move to SM around 2 months ago. We came over from RS(Ev1 Servers) because of the problems with strict SPAM rules and issues. Our server was unplugged for a supposed blacklist although the account was not sending out SPAM. It was discovered later that the account had a type of email harvesting software for sale and so we removed it. However, getting your server unplugged without any warning is not very good for us. RS chased us away with another warning that said if it happens again our account will be closed. Very dissappointing considering how hard it is to track down SPAM sometimes.

Anyways, we purchased our first server (P IV 3.0 GHz) and we've been happy since although we had a few small issues but they've been worked out. Support is a little lacking sometimes, but overall we're happy.

Just for personal information my name is Denver and I am into Web Hosting and Development. You'll probably see more of me around this forum and I look forwards to some good discussions.

After outgrowing 5 hosts, I finally stumbled across servermatrix. I bought the 1.7 celeron in early november and havent looked back. Currently working on getting some more bw and maybe another server or two (if i keep goring) I run ONE website, i am not a hosting business, but i do host a few personal sites (50 megs and 1 gig goes to three sites).

My name is Bryce i have been married for four months and I live in Indiana.

I`m Todd.

I ran a shell hosting server about 5-6 years ago.
Then got out of the game for a while, and just ran a couple of my sites on other servers.

Then I had 2 servers at RS, both Ensim Basic (2 years ago)... No real bad expierence other than they ran out of IPs, and took FOREVER to get support.

This past year I "attached" myself to a friends server to grow, and now I have about 30 customers 100% referalls from friends or previous customers. Original customers were/are friends.. and have spread the word.

Now I have a SM Cele server for one of my BIG sites, and to also eventually sell webhosting / reseller plans from..

My problem is I have to many ideas, and plans.
I probably run or try to run/setup 10+ sites ontop of the customers I do.

Main interests are 4-Wheeling(jeeps), and just working on stuff in the garage... tools, welding.. metal working etc..

I enjoy making money, and if I have an idea I will most likely try it hence why I have alot of sites too...

I enjoy buying and selling things, and ebay.

I also do Computer Repair, Upgrades, and buildups...

Heh why not?

I came to ThePlanet in late July. This is an amazing place to work. I'm used to working in tech firms with a few dim bulbs in tech support, and I don't really see any of that here.

I'm a college student and will graduate one of these years. In my spare time I run and develop for a small gaming organisation.

My turn I guess.

Married guy, father of three great boys ( 6 to 16 years old). I am an ex-firefighter.
I live on a Island in Puget Sound Washington, and run my hosting company full time. I have been in business for myself since 1996, and doing web hosting since 1999.

I just took delivery of a SM Dual Xeon, Cpanel, and RHEL 3. Am still getting it set up, but so far am pleased. Couple quirks found (lynx changed? lol) so far about RHEL.
I also have a cpanel dual Xeon at EV1.

That is it in a nutshell. Hope my stay at SM is a long one.
Glenn

Hi there, I'm Tom (hi tom!)

My buddy and I used to be hosted with one of these 100% Cpanel places but, unfortunately, the guy had really shitty tech support and had a bad habit of changing things on hist servers without letting anybody know (Let's turn off register_globals in php....oops! all your galleries broke! sorry...) Well, even for $10/month this got old after two times and in mid-November my friend and I started shopping around for good dedicated hosting deals. We're UNIX geeks and really missed the feel of a blank SSH terminal and the plain glory of pine.

I found ServerMatrix and emailed Angela V. a few times to get the process started on buying a server. Currently I'm on the 1.7 Celeron w/ 512MB Ram. It's running FreeBSD 4.9 with the following services:

+ Mail-related
- IMAP and POP3 connection support
- HORDE Webmail
- Mailman mailing lists
- SpamAssassin mail filtering
+ Web Thingamabobs
- Apache 1.3.29 (mod_ssl, mod_php4, mod_perl, mod_gzip)
- Urchin Web Stats
+ Misc goodies
- MySQL Server
- BIND DNS server

....and some other goodies not listed like Ventrilo voice chat and shoutcast servers for when we occasionally use them.

About me? I'm a 19 year-old currently going to some classes at UTA and also working full-time in UTA's IT department doing technical support. Check out my personal domain at http://www.tomservo.net and also, if you're into online gaming and go to Quakecon be sure and look me up. I'm the goofy-looking redhead that goes by 'TomServo'

If you've got a question about FreeBSD-related things then feel free to PM me and I'll try to help you out.

Good meeting everybody. Have a great day! -Tom

Hey all...
My name is David, and I've been doing "net" stuff since it was just dial-in bulletin boards, and my "cutting edge" machine was an Apple II+ with a 300 baud modem(no..not Kbaud...just plain baud). I learned programming for the first time on a Commadore 64, and the archive mechanism was a cassette tape! :shock: .... For the most part it was just play and "geek stuff".

I've been doing corporate website, media, and marketing design since 1996, and have several subcontractors who hate dealing with clients, and love having me do "business stuff" for them while they do their creative work. For the last 3 years my attentions were split between doing this part time and a software startup I was a part of. I've recently left the software company, and decided to get more serious about our web business.

I've worked with all kinds of servers, and can kick a windows machine into shape without trouble, but my first love is *nix boxes...so our boxes with SM right now are a P4 RH9 and a Dual Xeon RHEL. So far all our people who need Windows have had their own servers already. We also have another server with another company for about 5 years (working at migrating the last of those accounts to the SM servers), and while we never really had major problems, they've changed ownership several times, and the service has not been great, and their offerings are nothing compared to what SM gives us. So here we are!

So far we are totally in love with SM! But from what I've heard, that's not unusual! I have to admit that setting up a mulit-site server on *nix is a new thing for me, but *nix as a whole is not. We've learned a lot fast (I've got a brother who's a magor *nix guru, and acting as our senior IT, and teaching me the few pieces I'm missing, and the others on this forum have offered some great advice too!), so feel free to shoot me questions if you're going through it for the first time, 'cuz we've probably run into it to too!

Other stuff? I grew up in Vermont, moved to Nashville for several years after college, and now live about 3 miles outside of Boston on a bluff (I see the city through the trees at night). I am fantastically happily married, have a new 6month baby boy named Alex, love sailing, and went to college for a degree that says I can build recording studios and sound equiptment for stages (the big ones). I have ton's of friends in Nashville TN, and lived there for several years, but ended up enjoying web related stuff better than the music industry. Oh...and I love Monty Python, the Princess Bride, and the Matrix and Lord of the Ring movies, and Margaritta's!

Okay...sorry for the super long post, but I just love the sound of my own typing! (joke)

Hi

I'm from France running a small hosting company and personal web sites on a celeron at SM

I had a server at Rackshack then at FDC.

RHEL + Cpanel is really great.

thanks

Hi, my name is Bob, I live in a place called, Bob, my mom's name is Bob, and I believe Linux are for computer Newbies *ducks*

Seriously, I came to this community back in October, ordered my server in October... been the grouch of the forums every since

Hello everyone,

I made my move to SM in late November 2003 - So far not a single problem to speak of.

I've been into computers for as long as I can remember; Started programming on the Commodore 64 at the age of 12, albiet it was BASIC - but it gave me a strong foundation in programming. Have progressively moved up the charts, 386, 486, P1, P3 and now a P4. (as a matter of fact, the C64 is still working!) and from Windows to Linux.

I am currently a web designer/programmer and a 'starting' webhost (ambition gets the better of me...I've been starting for the past 7 years!) but PERL is where my passion lies. I can't get enough of developing something from scratch.

I've been bouncing around from shared hosting/resellers over the past 7 years with nothing but bad luck until now. I never knew how much better things would be with a dedicated server!

Besides computers, my other childhood passion is my current full time job; I am a conductor on a large Canadian railway.

I am married with 1 child, and if you couldn't guess it, I am Canadian Eh, which is great - because living in an igloo allows us to overclock everything!!

I am sincerely looking forward to doing business with SM, as well as learning and sharing on these forums.

Russ

Hey Russ,
Cool job! Speaking of Igloos... I see you are in Van eh? Staying warm? You guys sent us your cold air... LOL. I am a little south of you, in the San Juan Islands here.
Darned cold here.
Glenn

Man, it hasn't been like this for a quite a few years. Last night -9 C with a wind chill -21 C. Top that off with hanging off a boxcar at 15MPH.

Yup, Been awhile. Hang on to that boxcar tomorrow. Supposed to be in for a storm that rivals the 1996 storm.
Glenn

I just got my own home grown server (Win2003) setup on the 3rd. Like most people here I'm breaking into the glamorous world of web hosting My main job is as a .NET / SQL Server consultant doing web apps. I've got a pretty strong background with SQL Server so feel free to hit me up with any questions and I'll see what I can do.

Justin

Is that all? It's supposed to be -1 F (~ -17 c?) here tonight and I'm in the middle of the USA. :shock: I'm about ready to move to Texas to get out of this weather.

If you do we may have a job for you (if you don't mind tech support ).

Yeah, but it is certainly unusual for us here. Pretty rare to get that cold here.

Texas...? Yeah, been there a few times. My oldest son lives a little East of Dallas. That part of Texas is not too bad IMHO.
This cold keeps up.... I may take up a job in Texas, lol.
Glenn

Bill here, started working in broadcast stations when I was 15. AFter getting my FCC first class licence hopped to a bigger station later moving to California in my 20's and working for the ABC network.

After I could stand no more after 8 years I went to work at SFO airport as a engineer overseeing comms, radio & radar stuff.

7 years later was offered a job in Japan developing digital audio stuff for broadcasters. Company went bust and I ended up in Hong Kong designing a cable TV network. That lasted 6 years until they cleared out all the 'non locals" from the payroll.

Been "retired" since (nice word for unemployed).

Built my first PC in 1977, a "S-100 Bus" Z-80 CPU machine with 64k of RAM (64K not M. 64K was the max the system could support) Speed a peppy 4K.
A 5.25 inch floppy drive, a 300 Baud modem and a converted IBM typewriter printer.

Built a PC then meant getting a box full of blank PC boards and many plastic bags of chips, resistors, etc that you hand soldered to the boards.

Every single chip had to be hand soldered to the boards.

Software was called "CP/M" that for many reasons looks and feels a lot like MSDOS.

Programs? Want one, write it! Used Basic & Assembly & 8080 machine code.

Now, jobless in Hong Kong I just barely survive with my tiny hosting business with server at SM and some co located in a datacenter in HK.

If I could afford a move to Texas I too would be an applicant for jobs at SM!

Bill

Hi, I'm Tim.

I just ordered my SM server tonight and I'm (im)patiently waiting to give it a try. I've come here from an amazingly great shared hosting company simply because my sites were eating up way to much space and so I've tried to give this dedicated server thing a try.

I'm a journalist and general tech consultant (web design, help desk, hardware installing, etc.). As a hobby I also moderate a number of user group mailing lists (part of what was eating up my space!) and blog too.

Both on and off the job, I'm a big proponent of all things Free Software (a.k.a. Open Source). I've been on servers running GNU/Linux since 1997, but this is the first one I'll be admin on. On the other hand, I've been running GNU/Linux on my desktop since 1998, replacing Windows as my main desktop in 2001. I write professionally on GNU/Linux and Mac.

Anyway, its nice to meet y'all and I look forward to hopefully many good years at SM.

Mike, level 1 tech support here at the Planet.

Run a couple of websites for kicks and do hardcore development in whatever language I can get a free compiler for ;p

Hi, my name is Alexis, I've just ordered my first server at SM, a SuperCeleron 2.4 with a free second 80Gb hard disk (it's great to hang around on WHT and find this kind of offers ).

I live at Lima, Peru I am into computers since I was 11. I entered web development and started selling web hosting like 3 years ago.

I have dedicated servers with other companies and this one is the first one at ServerMatrix.

I own a web agency called Ventanazul and we do web design and development for customers at different countries (currently finishing a job for a customer at Switzerland and other at Denver, USA).

It's great to be part of SM !.

Hi,

I just realised i have never posted here

Anyway my age will probaly put most people off in here.
I have been with computers ever seens i was born due to my dad working with them. About 1 and half years ago i started to learn web devolpment in PHP just to annoy my dad beacuse he doesnt like anything to do with C lanaguages and he manialy programs ASP in web development. PC's arnt really a hobby of mine its just something i do to earn a few bucks and just another skill i have obtained my hobby is in RC nitro cars.

I have a very bad habbit when writing in forums/emails is that for some reason i do alot of double enters and get so annoyed with myself and i have to try and edit them out. The cause of this is im dyslixic in english(any langauge really) and you might of noticed my grammar/punctation/spelling is all wrong and the double enters help me understand when i do a read back.

Well sorry to write such a long post (well its long for me).

I am very helpful when i can help but i can always listen and "pretend i understand" hehe.

-Adam

Welcome along guys!

I might as well post here, *ahem*
Hi, my name is Daejuan Jacobs(A.K.A., DJ_Max, daejuanj, & magicdj)
I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois (USA). I plan on going to Devry Institute soon.

I'm very fluent in XHTML, plus i'm a PHP/MySQL & PostGresSQL programmer. Me and a group of people are developing a CMS, so far it's in the planning stages. But it's going to be very good (unlike any you've seen. )

Linux & Mac OS are my two favorite operating systems. For servers i'll chose any Linux OS, with the standard cPanel install, even though I like Directadmin a lot better.

I don't have a SM server yet but I plan on getting one soon. Now I'm just here to help other people.

I was at EV1 but their deal with SCO made me go hunting for a new home. I just bought a Dual Xeon Total Control and will be moving to 5 more from Ev1.

Hello Everyone,

My name is: David Baumgart.
I'm really intrested in Hosting, Servers, Networking and Building PC's.

I currently own a hosting company.
I'll be buying a server (80GB) from ServerMatrix sometime this month.

I currently think ServerMatrix are the one and only best company out there!

I hope to have loads of fun being hosted at ServerMatrix and hope to get on well with there awesome helpful staff.

I hope i have fun in these lovely Forums.

Many Regards,

David Baumgart

Welcome DavidBaumgart!

I hope you'll find SM as great of a company as I have!

These forums are quite possibly the best forums I have ever seen for server help. Usually no matter what level the problem is, someone here will help!

Good Luck!

Thankyou ever so much for Welcoming me i feel so at home, when i visit these forums.

Thanks once again.

David.

Hey I'll do this

My name's Michael McKoy ;p I'm do some game hosting but its a recent start up, haven't really had time to look at customers, real life hit had the past month. I mainly got a server originally to host my own Counter-strike community, which is several years old but had a poor provider. I was at ServerBeach but constant support issues forced me to reconsider that.. and at last I landed here.

I've got a SuperXeon right now and a P4 2.4 that I'm gonna change to 2.8. I've had some bumps here but unlike my former host the ticket system works quite well, responses are fast, and most importantly: I GET NOTIFIED! You have no idea how nice it is to recieve email notification of reboots and ticket changes ;P

Since posting that I was leaving my old host, over 25 people from their forums have PM'd me asking where I was going, as they had the same problems I do. They actually have their forums hide servermatrix's name! I've been trying to redirect them all here

How ever so nice to meet you 'Ferret'

David

Hello, Im Gordon. Im in the same boat as most of you out there, webdesign / hosting. Just purchased a Super Resellerz Box about 10 hours ago. Looking forward to getting up and running and chatting on here..

gp

(the donkey avatar is because sometimes Im not the most knowledgable when it comes to unix boxes)

Greetings

Hi, my name is Patrick; and I am an alcoholic *Hi Patrick*

Applause not needed.

I just picked up a server a couple days ago. Been playing around a lot and needed my own remote platform to work with. Currently is just going to be used for gaming servers, because I have nothing better to do with my time . Its Windows 2k3(put down the bats) which is nice for me because thats really all I do. Windows Administration. Getting really tired of dealing with the end users of the world, people who think they can do upgrades, and temps that took one class so they know how to manage an AD.</rant>

So. I am moving in to the world of development because it has always been a hobby and its something I have grown to enjoy. I currently am working on .NET development(again, no hitting please) because its what I know. Enough about me, time for praise.

I have two reasons I am posting. Firstly to thanks SM for being fast as hell getting a server up and running and for providing a really nice network to play around with. I had been debating of which provider to go with, after checking these forums I knew where to turn. Which brings me to the second point. I read through the forums trying to get a feel of what sort of community this company brings to the table. very impressed. Glad to see fellow people help when others are in need.

Looking forward to sticking with SM and their forums.

Patrick

Greetings all..

Thanks for the welcome to Servernatrix. So far so good. Great support here on the forum boards and beyound.Keep it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Im a newbie at home here so please be patient.

Have a nice day!

I'm sure you'll find tons of help here on these forums!

Welcome aboard!

My name is Jeffrey McPheeters and I've actually been here at SM for 3 months or so. I still have an account with Dathorn on one of Andrew's servers here at The Planet, so I feel like I've been with these folks for a while now (more than 18 months, total). But it's VERY nice having a dedicated server, once again, especially with the smooth, stable performance I've received here. Kudos to SM and The Planet.

I'm almost 50, semi-retired, and have been building and hosting sites on a referral basis only for nearly 10 years. Started in my home for some non-profit orgs related to home schooling, and grew from there. I have 3 external dedicated servers, two local servers (behind my T-1) and manage them all from an Apple Titanium PowerBook which roams with me.

One of my objectives is to tour The Planet, now that I know where they are located, as I get to Dallas rather frequently (my wife is an "extremely" successful Mary Kay director --thus my ability to semi-retire-- and they have a distribution center near The Planet, I believe.)

Oh, we have 3 sons, each with their own iBook and Shuttle PC, so they are quite familiar with Win2000/XP/MacOS X. The only one who doesn't do geeky stuff here is my wife. She doesn't even do her own email!

Little about me....my name is Craig Smith, I'm a 22 year old computer science student in Sacramento CA. Currently I'm holding down a fed job doing misc C++ and PHP coding which I absolutely love. I'm a FreeBSD nut! Been messing with the OS for a little over 4 years, I am by no means a guru but I manage to hack my way out of any trouble i get myself into. A few months ago I built a new rack server here at home with a 500GB raid 5 setup and got my whole network upgraded to gigabit....WOW I should have done that a long time ago.

I just picked up my first server here at SM yesterday and so far I couldn't be happier with it. One day and I already have a humorous story. I went through the usual process of upgrading. The server came with 5.1 installed, I got it upgraded to 5.2.1 and rebooted without problems. Then I trimmed up my kernel and added firewall support....unfortunately I forgot to add the firewall options to rc.conf before I rebooted. Naturally I found myself and everybody else locked out of my server. Nice one The support team was able to get me fixed up in no time, I am very greatful.

You guys have already made a great impression on me, keep up the good work.

Our server will be setup shortly here.
And we do hope to stay long with SM.

Hi, my name is Joey.

I've been through it all over the past six years. I'm not even going to go into all the hell I went through for the first two years with using shared webhosts. The past four years I ran all my websites off a home server which has worked very well for me. Now that I'm starting to get a client base I decided to look at dedicated options again. I ordered the SuperRAID server about five hours ago, I'm excited and cant wait for it to come online. I've heard great things about SM and TP so hopefully things go smoothly.

I'll be lurking around here... Who knows I may become a regular.

Hi All,

My name's Ian, I'm over in the UK. Co-owner of the site http://www.office-humour.co.uk which is soon to be hosted here at Server Matrix. Just waiting for the server to be ready now. We've outgrown shared hosts in both bandwidth usage and disk space so needed to move to a proper host. The site is just over a year old and last month we had 5,162,636 hits with 1,627,179 page views.

My own site (horribly out-of-date) is http://www.flatpackedworld.co.uk.

Ian

We are Borg,

ServerMatrix will be assimilated, resistance is futile. We need more network resources. So far we are very happy, the SM staff does comply.

i just relised i never introduced my self


name : Welby McRoberts
Job : don't know actually Generic Servermonkey / PHP Coder / VoIP Man
Location : the "wonderful" Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland
age : ... well i was born at roughtly 466516800 so you work it out
Server OS of choice : FreeBSD of course
MTA of choice : QMail
Personal site : http://www.wheely-bin.co.uk
Bussiness site : contact me
etcetc

HI my name is Andi (27) joined early this year setting up a test sever. Vlad is my old name used when playing mega team fortress .

I liive in the south east of England , the Thames Valley, the silicon valley of the UK.

I have an academic background in Computer science and Cybernetics (study of systems, robotics and AI etc), used to be a programmer/database developer for a software house developing electoral role management systems, currently own a IT repair and maintenance company, looking to expand and/or new projects.

Used to be into Linux in a big way years ago … just getting back into it! Also used a lot of windows servers/systems in my time.

AndiC_UK akka Vlad

Hello everyone. My name is Rich, and I'm a serverholic. ("Hi Rich!")

I came here in May of this year with my first dedicated server, SM's dual Xeon . In August, when the TC P2800 was same price as I was payig for SM's box, I switched over to that and very happy with it.

Enough about the server stuff, I'm sure you're all well aware that this place hosts dedicated servers (did I here a "HUH?!"?). I come from Cleveland, Ohio, am currently a Junior in high school and am 17 years old (as of October). I have been training to be a pilot since I was 13 because ever since my parents got me Flight Simulator 98, thats all I ever wanted to do (I now have FS2000, 2K2 AND 2K4 if you actually think I play 89). Now that I'm 17, I'm legal to get that license and in a couple of months I'll be a certified Private Pilot ::scarry thought::.

Thats enough about me, so who wants the stand next?

name : steve
Job : electrical engineer even though i studdied aerospace engineering at uni
Location : in the sunny midlands (uk)
age : 21
i use windows 2000, cant use linux as my fav game is windows only but my server is linux which i use for my clan teamspeak and a few websites of mine

Location : Huntsville Alabama.

I was employed by Nasa nautical space flight shuttle [EMS-Cad-schematics] design and AI simulation development team in [1995-2001] by boeing enterprise corporation as co-developer and translated pre-communication relay system developer and lead programmer of communication software system for GBL tracking devices.

--Opps--
Sorry For the Post Above I thought this was a Name your experience in computers | computer releated experience forum.
If anyone has this type of experience please contact me as I'm always looking for someone with this type of experience to chat with.
Thanks again
--Opps--