No matter which expo you attend, chances are Red Hat's Thomas Cameron has spoken at it. Thomas has a couple of talks at SCALE 12X, and the SCALE Team caught up with him for this interview.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: My name is Thomas Cameron, and I am a Senior Principal Solutions Architect at Red Hat. I am the Chief Architect for the western US, which means that I manage strategic technical relationships between Red Hat and key Red Hat customers in the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones.
I started in IT back in 1993, when I was a sysadmin on a little 40-node token-ring Novell NetWare network. Since then, I've worked in Microsoft, Unix, and of course Linux computing environments. I'm passionate about computing in general, and Open Source computing specifically.
Q: You're giving a talk on a few different topics. Without tipping your hand on the actual talks, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: I'm giving two talks: introduction to patching for the new sysadmin, and next-generation clustering with Linux.
In the patching talk, I'll discuss not so much the mechanics of patching, but more what to patch, when to patch, when it makes sense to skip patches, and considerations for patching in production environments.
In the clustering talk, I'll go over how to set up a highly available application cluster, including using iSCSI and GFS2 for multi-access filesystems. I'll be demonstrating using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta.
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: No, I've been to SCALE several times, and it is one of my all-time favorite Linux events. Every year the presentations get better and cover more interesting topics. I've formed some incredible friendships at SCALE over the years, and gotten to know industry luminaries. I love SCALE and I'm honored to be a part of it!
[SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero]