As a college student, I was already very interested in Linux and Unix technologies. I installed my first home linux server in 1998. It contained some standard servers like samba, apache and a print server, but also I configured this server to be my home firewall using ipchains. In 2000 I choose to implement my thesis, a 3D world containing all kinds of forces, in a 3d gnome panel in Linux. In 2001, I graduated from the UHasselt and got my degree in computer science.

I started working for the flemish governement, supporting Sun Solaris servers. Virtualisation was not yet an item in 2001, so we supported hundreds of pizza boxes and a few Enterprise 10k machines. Since we supported a lot of old (10+ years old) machines, sometimes located at foreign sites in Flanders, I learned to be creative in solving problems. In the following years, I learned programming using shell, perl, python and C++.

In 2008, I started working for Fortis (later BNP Paribas Fortis) as a senior Solaris system engineer. Since we needed to install a lot of new physical solaris machines, zones and VMs, I setup a jumstart server and created a php website to install these servers. I used the existing "KIT" framework that was scripted inhouse to create custom packages that were used to create server profiles. This way, a fully automated server installation could be done using custom scripting. Tools like puppet and ansible were not yet created or widely known at that time.

In 2011, I founded "Verbois IT Consulting" and started working on my own. A few months later, I was contact by Cegeka and left BNP Paribas Fortis to join the Cegeka Outsourcings Unix team. This was a young team, missing some experienced teammembers. Since we supported big banks and had a lot of contact with these customers, I was handled to task to make the team more professional and to relief the pressure on the young team members, giving them room to grow. In the past 8 years, the team grew to one of the leading teams of Cegeka. We standardised the way we work, created lots of documentation and automated all standard tasks. Using tools like Jenkins, Puppet and Ansible, I am one of the leading guys in the team.

In 2018, I learned OpenShift and also became "Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Application Development" and was one of the first Belgian engineers to reach this Certification. Using containers, automating environments is very simple, but you still have to automate them. These things don't just happen, you need strong and capable engineers to do this. Once this is done, development teams can benefit from the speed and ease of use of these automated flow. At the moment, I'm migrating an extensive jboss environment to a highly automated OpenShift environment.

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Unix is not a future proof technical solution anymore. Most Unix suppliers have dropped development of their OS'es and stopped selling hardware. The most recent suppliers are Oracle (former Sun) who dropped Solaris and HP who stopped releasing new features on HPUX. Not long before also IBM will end the support and development of AIX. However, although new Unix systems are very rare, existing systems are still the most important systems for a lot of companies. These systems can be very costly and knowledge about these systems can be limited due to people that left the company. In the end, these systems might become the most delicate and costly systems in the network. In case of problems, you really need a specialist that knows these systems through and trough.

In the last 8 years, I became a real HPUX specialist. If you need have a problem with one of your systems, and you need a real specilist to solve your problems, don't hesitate to contact us. Migrating Unix systems (HPUX, Solaris or AIX) to Linux systems can optimize cost, remove the information problem and take away the risks of using these old Unix systems. We can assist in migrating these systems to Linux systems.

Since RedHat systems was part of my daily work in the past 8 years, I am a specialist in RedHat as well. However, my knownledge is not limited to RedHat systems. Debian, Ubuntu, Suse and of course Centos are also part of my knowledge.

Automating tasks and using configuration as code is one of my specialties. For the last 15 years I'm automating installations, configuration, migrations, ... To do this, I'm daily using tools like GitLab, Jenkins, Ansible and Puppet. For this, I'm using coding languages Shell, Perl, Python, Groovy, C++, ... My real specialty is Perl and I have used it to write big frameworks supporting database refreshes, SSL Certificate management. Most of these frameworks are written before tools like Ansible were available and I'm still supporting and upgrading them.

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