About Me

My name is Carl Farrington. I’m 27 years old, already. How did that happen?!

I live in a place called Bowdon-Vale, near Altrincham in Cheshire, England.

For the last 11 years I have been working in the mainstream field of computing, i.e. all the general sometimes mundane stuff. I started off in a local computer shop about a week into the summer holidays after finishing school. My grandma sent me to look for a job and I’m glad I listened to her.

I worked in that computer shop for maybe 18 months, then another one briefly, ’til I was grabbed by a very driven sales chap who was great with people and could sell oil to the arabs. I spent a couple of years with him, trying to make good on all the things he promised to people (”dropped in at the deep end” is the phrase that springs to mind). I decided enough was enough, and he was more interested in the car leasing business he’d started so I went away and took the customers with me.

Since then, maybe 7 - 8 years, I have been working by myself supporting small businesses and their IT needs.

Apart from the odd peer to peer network, pretty much all of my customers run Windows Server 2003 Active Directory domains and Exchange Sever 2003. I am however quite disillusioned with the Microsoft-created world and am quite fanatical about Open Source software - I am writing this from my Fedora 9 desktop.

Where possible I am trying to drive customers towards OpenOffice.org. I worry about and dislike software vendor lock-in, forced upgrades, no upgrades, no fixes for “legacy products”, proprietary protocols and proprietary formats. I’m excited about the prospect of OpenChange/libmapi and a proper working Evolution MAPI plugin for connecting to Exchange servers, and am currently exploring a complete Linux based client-server system using FreeIPA, NFSv4 and an as yet undecided groupware suite.

Why CSS Networks ? Well, when I started my business, I decided I didn’t need a fancy name or anything, so I traded as “Computer Support Services”, which I thought was fairly self explanatory. I chose that name because if and when I wanted to become a limited company later, that name was available for a limited company. A few years later when I did become a limited company, that name had been taken, and since I tend to look after small business networks, I just made the Computer Support Services into CSS and stuck Networks on the end.