Meet "Rich"!

Meet Rich Allcorn, aka Richard A. Allcorn, or as he is better known by his login name, "rAllcorn". Rich is a systems engineer, and works with LINUX in various areas of the industry. He is truly a "jack-of-all-trades", with varied experience in the areas of telephone electronics, two-way radio and radio telephone communications, ham radio, and in computers.



His CB handle is "DJ", given to him because at the time he got into CB's in High School he was a D.J. at the local radio station. His specialties range from electrical wiring, telephone cabling, TV cabling, and network wiring, to punch block, equipment racks, sound systems, video systems and console construction. He is an experienced documentations specialist in documenting computer systems, servers, networks, and computer rooms. He is comfortable in Microsoft Windows and Excel, both of which he uses extensively in his documentations, and in Visio, a useful tool in documenting network topoloy and equipment placement and planning. Also an amateur photographer, Rich likes to photograph systems laytouts and equipment rooms to compliment his documentation projects. His favorite areas of interest are in remote access, dial-up, VPN, and mobile computing.

LINUX

Rich's first exposure to UNIX was with SCO-XENIX. In the form of TRS-XENIX, a Tandy/Radio Shack branded release of XENIX, Rich fell in love with the structure and the layout of the operating system. The Crontab functions (for starting applications at a particular time, automatically), the messaging, finger, who, and the uucp capaabilities all showed Rich thath this operating system had "potential"! He loved the fact that he could "dial-in" to the system and login from at home!

Not long after his TRS-XENIX experience, he put in a bid and won a job to put together an entire SCO-XENIX multi-user system for a local law firm. They wanted terminals in every office, and in the conference room, a common laser printer for the office to use for printing, and 2 dial-up lines to allow for dialing into the system from at home! The job included running the wiring for very office terminal, for every dial-up line, and for the multi-user host that would be running the XENIX OS. It all worked beautifully, and he had the owner purchase the entire SCO-XENIX Development system, with full documentation! By the time his dial-up after-install support was up, he had "automated" most of the day-to-day systems administration tasks with shell scripts that he wrote to perform routine repeat maintenance.