rfc2324.org - Whois

Resumée


Resumée for Maximilian "Barbarossa" Wilhelm <max at rfc2324 . org>

Abstract / Who am I in really short

I´m a 27 year old Linux hacker fascinated by Open Source and interested in networking stuff, network security, firewalling (esp. netfilter) using Debian since Woody began to become stable. Besides all this computer stuff I'm interested in photography (lately upgraded to a Nikon D300, owning some lenses and stuff), music (playing piano and organ), playing Billard and driving motorcycles when getting the opportunity.

The time

Jan. 1984
First contact with RL™
1994 - 2003
High school at Gymnasium Theodorianum, Paderborn
Resulting in a high school diploma (Abitur)
Oct 2003
Started studying computer science at University of Paderborn
Feb 2004 - Mar 2010
Working at Network/system administ//ration at the Institute of Mathematics (RBM) at the University of Paderborn
Sep 2007
Internship at Telefónica Deutschland GmbH
Jan 2008
Started own little business as network/system administrator, consultant, developer, problem solver
Sep 2008
Got Bachelor of Computer Science degree at the University of Paderborn
Held a talk (german) on the topic of my thesis ("Design and implementation of a WakeUpManager") at Chemnizer LinuxTage
Bachelor thesis (german) [PDF]
Sep 2011
Finished studies at the University of Paderborn with a Diplom Informatiker degree.

Projects and involvments

School time

First own PC (an old P75 running Win 95) (around 1998)

First little home network with Windows NT (incl. NT Server), finding M$ amazing... (around 1999)

Realized that limited MS products aren't fulfilling and started to use Linux (starting with SuSE 6.4)

Realized that SuSE isn't that fulfilling for someone who wants to know what's going on, began to use Debian (potato) and migrated all machines to it (around 2002)

Wrote a database-based management software for school owned geographic and historical maps

Member of the Linux User Group OWL since October 2002

The months between school and university

Get more and more fascinated of Free Software and OpenSource and attended at

As a result of the conferences I became a Skolelinux / Debian EDU developer (retired).

Migrated a set of Arktur based school servers to Skolelinux, hacking some scripts to convert passwd/smbpasswd based user management to LDAP.

University / RBM time

Attended some more LinuxTags, DebConfs to meet other OpenSource people and represent Skolelinux.

Held a course on Linux basics for students of electrical engineering (with Sebastian Porompka). (Dec 2003)

First act at RBM was to setup own DNS servers with RBM subdomains and LDAP for users/groups to get rid of NIS.
I wrote a management tool for DNS while sitting in a software development lecture which still is in use :)

Created a backup system concept for RBM servers on my own, setup IBM Tivoli Storage Manager accordingly and kept it running as one-man-show (starting in August 2004, ended in April 2009 due to migration to an external backup provider).

Began to restructure the entire RBM network and setup highly available firewall system with stateful failover using Linux 2.6 netfilter, heartbeat and ct_sync (Jan/Feb 2006)
I had to update the ct_sync patches to get them working with current kernels.
At that time I also wrote cisco-stats, a vlan distribution reporting tool for cisco switches.
Later on the ct_sync patches have been replaced by using conntrackd, a connection tracking system in user space.

Reworked some helper scripts hacked to configure the firewall and designed/wrote A Linux Firewall Framework (Alff) (Apr 2006)
The basic idea of Alff is to have a simple framework which calls plugins which generate rules for you. Alff knows about vlans (think: network segments, not 802.1q) and services.

Jan-Benedict Glaw told me about the Linux Guru-Guide. I began to write a chapter about LDAP/Kerberos machine access management and fixed some other stuff.

LPIC-1 Certification (May 2006)

Wrote the GIT backend to LXR (with Jan-Benedict Glaw).

Started maintaining liblinux-kernelsort-perl as Debian package (useful within LXR), maybe others follow...

LPIC-2 Certification (June 2007)

While setting up a VPN server at RBM using OpenVPN 2.1, I missed useful logging support, so I wrote WTMP logging support for OpenVPN and reworked an existing munin plugin to monitor VPN server usage. (Code is available here)

Experience with Xen 3 Paravirtualization. Maintaining 5+ systems. FC4 SAN experience with Dell/EMC storage solutions. EVMS knowledge. heartbeat knowledge, especially in conjunction with EVMS, Xen.
Howto author for "Running Windows Server in Xen 3".

Missed an option in Llgal to prevent it from generating a link to the full size images from the scaled down images on the HTML slides, so I wrote a patch which finally got included in Feb 2010.

Designed and implemented a data deduplication system for arvato for efficiently storing many similar ISO images. In the test environment the system used around 30% less storage capacity than the raw images.

Managing some linux based all-in-one servers of some local primary schools providing DNS, DHCP, Squid, Samba and OPSI services for the numbers of Windows XP based workstations, using shared profiles, WPAD and the like.

As part of the Project group Virtualized SuperComputer (PgVSC) I mainly on myself (with great ideas and code of Matthias Bolte) wrote the virtualization cluster management library libvscmgmt (overview) (Git-Web) and the steering system (overview) (Git-Web). The code of both is licensed under the GPL.
Hunted and fix some bugs within the libvirt virtualization library (with Mattias Bolte).
I also managed the network and servers for the project group including a main system providing basic network stuff, LDAP/Kerberos, PgSQL, Redmine, OpenVPN and such and the virtualization hosts running Xen, ESX with Virtual Center, VMotion, iSCSI and stuff.

Telefónica time

Internship project: simulation of intrastructure loss impact in Telefónica backbone to aid change management and operations.
The tool uses a database of physical and logical links and a list of physical links to fail and will simulate network behavior enabling the change management team to minimise outages while restructuring the network.

Miscellaneous things

You may want to have a look at http://files.rfc2324.org to see what I am/was hacking on.

Regarding to two quizes on http://bbspot.com I am:
You are Debian Linux. People have difficulty getting to know you. Once you finally open your shell they're apt to love you. You are Perl. People have a hard time understanding you, but you are always able to help them with almost all of their problems.
(Click on the images to get to the quiz.)

If we are at geek stuff, my Geek-Code is: 

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
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GCM/CS/IT/MU d+(--) s+: a- C++$ UL++++$ US>++++ P++(+++) L++++ E---
 W+ N o+ K- w O? M V? PS+ PE Y+(++) PGP++ t 5? X- R* tv b+(++) DI+(++)
 !D G++ e++>+++*  h*>-(---) r++ y?
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