Kevin Fenzi: How do you Fedora?

We recently interviewed Kevin Fenzi on how he uses Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine where we profile Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. If you are interested in being interviewed for a further installment of this series, you can contact us on the feedback form.

Who is Kevin Fenzi?

Kevin Fenzi is a long-time Linux user who got his start using Red Hat Linux in 1995. In those early days, he even had his own Red Hat-based distribution known as KRUD (Kevin’s Red Hat Uber Distribution). Kevin grew up in New Mexico and his favorite food is green chile. He works with a local greyhound rescue group and has two retired racing greyhounds.

The Fedora Community

Kevin singled out Tom Callaway as a person who most influenced his decision to contribute to Fedora. Tom reviewed his first attempts at packaging and sponsored Fenzi into the packagers group. Fenzi also enjoys working with Fedora Infrastructure as his full time job for the last four and a half years. He is responsible for keeping “all the tops spinning”.

“My job is a mix of putting out fires and bugs, deploying new software, keeping everything up to date, and planning for growth,” Fenzi said. Kevin firmly believes that being a good systems administrator is more about the things you learn over time than anything learned in a class.

What hardware?

Fenzi’s last two computers have been Lenovo laptops. The older of the two devices is a Yoga 2. You can see his review of the Yoga 2 here. In November, Kevin got the Yoga 900 with 16GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7 processor. His review of the device is here.

At home, he has two Dell C1100 servers that he obtained second-hand from a cloud company. One runs his test setup and the other runs his production setup. They each have twenty-four CPUs and 72GB of RAM.

What software?

He likes to run his systems on the bleeding edge.

“My laptop(s) run Fedora Rawhide 100% of the time. In general, it’s pretty fine day-to-day and reasonably easy to revert or work around issues that come along.” He switches back and forth between Xfce and GNOME, and finds it easy to get work done in either setup.

Kevin’s Xfce Desktop in action.

Kevin’s server currently runs Fedora 23 and has virtual machines running various other versions of Fedora, CentOS, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. His test server is updated as a new Fedora release approaches, and his production server is updated just before the release.

As for applications, Kevin makes use of several in his daily workflow. HexChat is used for IRC. Browsing is split between Firefox and Midori. Email and RSS feeds are handled by Claws Mail. Fenzi uses

and keypassx for keeping his passwords secure. For managing servers, he uses Ansible. All of his Ansible playbooks are open and available here.