About the Authors

Oliver Pelz has more than 10 years of experience as a software developer and system administrator. He graduated with a diploma degree in bioinformatics and is currently working at the German Cancer Research center in Heidelberg where he has authored and co-authored several scientific publications in the field of Bioinformatics. As well as developing web applications and biological databases for his department and scientists all over the world, he administers a division-wide Linux-based data center and has set up two high-performance CentOS clusters for the analysis of high-throughput microscope and genome sequencing data. He loves writing code, riding his mountain bike in the Black Forest of Germany and has been an absolute Linux and open source enthusiast for many years. He has contributed to several open-source projects in the past and also worked as a reviewer on the book CentOS High Performance, Packt Publishing. He maintains an IT tech blog at www.oliverpelz.de.

I would like to thank my family and especially my wonderful wife Beatrice and little son Jonah for their patience and understanding during all the long working hours while writing this book. Also I would like to thank the folks at Packt Publishing for all their support and the opportunity to to write this book, it was a great pleasure for me. Last but not least I would like to thank Jonathan Hobson for writing the first edition of this book: without him no second edition of this book would have been possible.

I would also like to thank all of the mentors that I've had over the years, especially Prof. Dr. Tobias Dykerhoff, who introduced me to the whole world of Linux a long time ago and infected me with his enthusiasm about open source and the free software movement.

Jonathan Hobson is a web developer, systems engineer, and applications programmer. For more than 20 years, he has been working behind the scenes to support companies, organizations, and individuals around the world to realize their digital ambitions. With an honors degree in both english and history and as a respected practitioner of many computer languages, Jonathan enjoys writing code, publishing articles, building computers, playing the video games, and getting 'out and about' in the big outdoors. He has been using CentOS since its inception, and over the years, it has not only earned his trust, but it has also become his first choice for a server solution. CentOS is a first class community-based enterprise class operating system. It is a pleasure to work with and because of this, Jonathan has written this book so that his knowledge and experience can be passed on to others.