Experience
Computer Science Instructor
Snead State Community College
Hardware — Over the years, Dack has gained an array of experience in installing various pieces of computer hardware. He has bought and installed numerous PCI, PCIe, and AGP cards and installed them in his own systems as well as systems for friends and acquaintances. He has experience installing RAM (SIMMs, DIMMs, SDRAM, and DDR-RAM), Processors (AMD and Intel), motherboards, and drives (Floppy, Zip, Hard Disks, CD-ROM, DVD, CD-RW, etc.). In addition to installing various pieces of equipment, he has experience in building computer systems from scratch using personally-ordered parts. Phillips also has experience with installing external devices including scanners, printers, gamepads, and many other devices via parallel, serial, and USB connections.
Networking — In December of 2001, Dack invested in an RJ-45 networking kit. Since then, he has made numerous Cat-5e cables for personal use as well as for use in networks of friends and acquaintances. He has experience in making both crossover and patch cables, and networking computers running Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10, as well as various Linux distributions. He has experience with connecting hubs, switches, and routers (wired and wireless), as well as cable and DSL modems. Phillips administrates his own LAN at home that connects three computers and several mobile and tablet devices. Two computers run Windows 10 Professional (64-bit), and the third runs Debian Linux. His network uses Windows drive shares that are accessible in Linux, as well as a Samba share accessible from the Windows machines. He also maintains this website as well as an SFTP server, VNC servers, and an SSH server.
Operating Systems — Phillips has a high familiarity with various PC Operating Systems, having used them since 1995, allowing him to have multifaceted experience with Windows 3.11/95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/10, Windows Server 2000/2003R2/2008/R2/2012/R2 as well as Linux (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Slackware, Mandrake, Debian, and Ubuntu), and a few flavors of UNIX (SunOS and FreeBSD). Currently, he uses Windows 10 Professional and Debian Linux at home and work. Phillips also has experience with virtualization Hypervisors such as Oracle Virtualbox and VMWare vSphere 5.1/5.5/and 6.0.
Web Design — Dack began learning HTML as a senior in high school in 1996. He first started creating webpages strictly for personal use. When he started taking classes at Auburn, he quickly gained a reputation for being knowledgable in HTML, and friends often did and still do turn to him for advice on designing webpages. During college, he added several web building skills to his repertoire including javascript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), DHTML, CGI, Perl, and PHP, as well as utilizing Oracle and MySQL databases for webpage output. He has recently delved into responsive web design using the latest tools available: HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery.