Ryan Faas

Ryan Faas is a freelance technology writer and consultant specializing in Mac and multi-platform network design and administration.  He began his career as the Mac Hardware correspondent for About.com in 1997, a position he held until 2001.  After leaving About.com, Ryan worked in educational IT for several years at the secondary and post-secondary level.  His experience at Bethlehem Central School District and SUNY Ulster Community College (both in upstate New York) provided an opportunity to work with both Macs and Windows clients, Mac OS X Server and Open Directory, and Windows Server an Active Directory.  He also worked as a Windows systems and network administrator for Transitional Services Association, a non-profit human services agency in Saratoga Springs, NY.  

During his years as a full-time IT professional, Ryan continued to accept consulting jobs in both education and business environments and continued writing about Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server.  In early 2006, Ryan embarked on a full time writing and consulting career.  As a consultant, he has worked with organizations ranging from home-based businesses to multi-national media outlets.  

As mentioned before, Ryan spent four and half years as a full-time correspondent covering Mac-related technologies for About.com.  During that time, his first book Troubleshooting, Maintaining, and Repairing Macs was published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill.  More recently, Ryan has been a frequent contributor to both Computerworld and the Peachpit Press website (content that was formerly located at InformIT.com) covering both Mac use and Mac OS X Server topics.  In 2005, he contributed five chapters as co-author of Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration, published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

During the spring and summer of 2007, Ryan wrote an in-depth series of articles for Computerworld's Servers and Data Centers channel regarding Open Directory, Mac OS X Server's native directory service.  The series was widely syndicated and extremely well received.  Ryan was pleased to receive praise from fellow Mac writes for this series including the following quote, published by John Martellaro of the Mac Observer website: "The article, one more in a notable series of articles by the Mr. Faas, is a good refresher for Apple network administrators."  He was also proud to receive positive feedback regarding the series from members of Open Directory development team at Apple.