User:Vdanen
I was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on February 12, 1976. I still live in Edmonton, along with my wife (Angela), my daughter (Jayden), and my cats: Pepper, Oz, Sammy, and Whiskeyjack.
I own my own consulting company (Danen Consulting Services), and have been doing Linux consulting since 2000. I also work full-time for Red Hat as a member of the Security Response Team, since February 2009. Prior to that, from June 2000 to January 2009 I worked for Mandriva, the creator of Mandriva Linux (once Mandrakelinux, and before that Linux-Mandrake), as the Security Team Manager. For my consulting company, I primarily do Linux server maintenance and configuration, as well as security audits. I do the odd web design and PHP-based web projects, and I also provide some domain hosting services. In mid-2003 I began thinking about secure Linux server solutions, and in late 2003 I began work on Annvix (originally called OpenSLS (Open Secure Linux Server)) which is an easy-to-use yet secure Linux server distribution (which I then halted development on in early 2008). Quite a while ago I wrote a PHP-based bug tracker called Anthill that I haven't touched in years, but amazingly people still download it (I've since moved on to using Bugzilla myself).
My primary, non-computer, interests are reading fantasy novels by authors such as Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Terry Goodkind, Steven Erikson, R. Scott Bakker, and others. I enjoy listening to music and have a fairly extensive music collection of various types of music. My favourite music is metal; there are so many sub-genres of metal music that it's hard to pinpoint exactly which sub-genre would be my favourite. I enjoy bands such as Nightwish, Opeth, Blind Guardian, Iced Earth, and Sirenia. I think, if I had to pin-point my favourite music, I'd have to say black metal. Unfortunately, I dislike the lyrical content of a number of these bands. Fortunately, I've discovered a number of Christian bands that fill this niche; bands such as Living Sacrifice, Soul Embraced, Demon Hunter, Indwelling, Immortal Souls, Becoming the Archetype, and As I Lay Dying.
On the philosophical/religious side, I am 100% sold out to Jesus (so, Christian) and attend Christcity Church; a non-denominational (but if I had to classify it, it would be charismatic/pentecostal) church in Edmonton. I was raised in a traditional Christian Reformed church; unfortunately I found it to be quite dull, dry, and empty. Christcity is a Bible-believing and Bible-preaching church and I appreciate the non-conformist and non-compromising spirit it has, because that is how I am. It is both a blessing and a challenge to attend a church like that.
I used to spend a lot of time as a teenager writing fantasy poetry, short stories, and even wrote 2.5 books of a fantasy trilogy. Unfortunately, I have not done any writing other than technical writing in years... hopefully one day I can remedy this. For kicks, I may put up the manuscripts for those 2.5 books and some of my short stories on the website; then again, I may not as the writing style is fairly immature (although I think the ideas were good).
In terms of computing, most of time is spent working for Red Hat... the number of security vulnerabilities being discovered (and the rate of discovery) keeps me and the rest of the team quite busy. This is one reason I had decided to start Annvix, to create a secure Linux distribution that is proactive in terms of security, rather than reactive, like most distributions these days. Having said that, and now that I've learned more about Red Hat and how things work and are designed, I'm quite happy with the security features and security-mindedness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is why I created the Annvix YUM Repository for RHEL/CentOS so that some of the packages I created for Annvix can find a home in RHEL.
Although I work for a Linux company and do most of my consulting on the Linux OS, I prefer to use Mac OS X for my desktops. I love Linux as a server OS, but I find OS X to suite my particular needs better (I also love eye candy). To that end, I use a MacBook Air for my mobile computing and use a quad-core 2.66GHz MacPro (easier to say than dual-core/dual-processor xeon) with two 23" Samsung and two 21" Samsung LCD monitors for my office (yes, four monitors). All of my servers, however, run CentOS 5 (soon to be RHEL6).
In terms of personal style, I'm a skin-art fan. I have a number of tattoos (you can look at some pictures , a number of earrings, and my nose, left nipple, and left eyebrow are pierced. I also shave my head (I find hair, even very short hair, to be entirely annoying and I think I look better bald). I wear biker boots and leather jackets. Unfortunately, the look is incomplete... I still need to get a good hog to compliment everything else. I also have a lot of unmarked skin left, so more tattoos are planned.
I've also played around with Apple's GarageBand app in some of my spare time (when I wasn't playing Morrowind, EverQuest, or UT2004 -- since then I've moved on to World of Warcraft and Rock Band/Guitar Hero; not that I have much time to play any of them...). Some of my creations are here as well... be gentle, they're not meant to be professional or anything, just me messing around with an extremely cool program.
Get my gnupg key here, the details of which follow:
pub 3072R/E8B86CAB 2011-04-12
Key fingerprint = 765E 89FE E95B F0FE 16E4 10CD 94BE 833C E8B8 6CAB
uid Vincent Danen <vdanen@linsec.ca>
uid Vincent Danen <vdanen@annvix.org>
uid Vincent Danen <vdanen@redhat.com>
sub 3072R/8BBA24C6 2011-04-12
