Eric Allman (F2) is the original author of Sendmail, co-founder and CTO of
Sendmail, Inc., and co-author of Sendmail, published by O'Reilly. At
U.C. Berkeley, he was the chief programmer on the INGRES database
management project, leader of the Mammoth project, and an early
contributor to BSD, authoring syslog, tset, the -me troff macros, and
trek. Eric designed database user and application interfaces at
Britton Lee (later Sharebase) and contributed to the Ring Array
Processor project for neural-network-based speech recognition at the
International Computer Science Institute. Eric is on the Editorial
Review Board of ACM Queue magazine and is a former member of the Board
of Directors of the USENIX Association.
Daniel L. Appelman (M8) is a lawyer in the Silicon Valley office of a major international law firm. He has been practicing in the areas of
cyberspace and software law for many years. He was the lawyer for
Berkeley Software Design in the BSDi/UNIX System Laboratories (AT&T)
case. Dan is the attorney for the USENIX Association and for many
tech companies. He is also founding chair of his firm's Information
Technology practice group, is the former chair of the California
Bar's Standing Committee on Cyberspace Law, and is a current member
of the California Bar Business Law Section's Executive Committee,
the Computer Law Association, and the American Bar Association's Cyberspace
Committee.
John Arrasjid (M4) has 20 years experience in the Computer Science field. His experience includes work with companies such as AT&T, Amdahl, 3Dfx
Interactive, Kubota Graphics, Roxio, and his own company, WebNexus
Communications, where he developed consulting practices and built a cross-platform IT team. John is currently a senior member of the VMware Professional Services
Organization as a Consulting Architect. John has developed a number of PSO
engagements, including Performance, Security, and Disaster Recovery and
Backup.
Don Bailey (S6) is a D.C.-area computer security engineer with nearly six years of professional experience in the computer security industry.
He has performed numerous vulnerability assessments and penetration
tests, as well as exploit and virus evaluation, and has developed new
secure laboratory technologies and architectures to support computer
network attack-related experimentation and training. He
holds a B.S. in computer science from James Madison University, and
he is commonly referred to as "Beetle," as a member of the Shmoo Group, a
well-respected, international collection of security professionals
who regularly present at premier security conferences.
Richard Bejtlich (T1, W1, R1) is founder of TaoSecurity (https://www.taosecurity.com), a company that helps clients detect, contain, and remediate intrusions using network
security monitoring (NSM) principles. Richard was previously a principal
consultant at Foundstone, performing incident response, emergency NSM, and
security research and training. He has created NSM operations for ManTech
International Corporation and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation. From
1998 to 2001 then-Captain Bejtlich defended global American information assets
in the Air Force Computer Emergency Response Team (AFCERT), performing and
supervising the real-time intrusion detection mission.
David N. Blank-Edelman (T7) is the Director of Technology
at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science
and the author of the O'Reilly book Perl for System Administration. He has
spent the last 19 years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology
Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He has given several successful
invited talks off the beaten path at LISA and is the chair of this year's conference.
Mark Burgess (M12, T8, R8) is Professor of Network and System Administration at
Oslo University College, Norway. He is the author of the configuration
management system cfengine and of several books and many papers on the
topic.
Gerald Carter (T6, W3, W8, F1) has been a member of the Samba Development Team
since 1998. He has published articles with various
Web-based magazines and teaches courses as a
consultant for several companies. Currently employed by
Hewlett-Packard as a Samba developer, Gerald has written
books for SAMS Publishing and is the author of the recent
LDAP System Administration for O'Reilly Publishing.
Strata Rose Chalup (T10, T14, W5) began as a fledgling sysadmin in 1983 and
has been leading and managing complex IT projects for many years,
serving in roles ranging from Project Manager to Director of Network
Operations. She has written a number of articles on management and
working with teams and has applied her management skills on various
volunteer boards, including BayLISA and SAGE. Strata has a keen interest
in network information systems and new publishing technologies and built
a successful consulting practice around being an avid early adopter of
new tools, starting with ncsa_httpd and C-based CGI libraries in 1993 and
moving on to wikis, RSS readers, and blogging. Another MIT dropout,
Strata founded VirtualNet Consulting in 1993.
Tom Christiansen (R2) has been involved with Perl since day zero of its initial public release in 1987. Author of several books on Perl,
including The Perl Cookbook and Programming Perl from O'Reilly, Tom is
also a major contributor to Perl's online documentation. He holds
undergraduate degrees in computer science and Spanish and a Master's in
computer science. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Mike Ciavarella (W6, R3, R6, F3) has been producing and editing technical documentation since
he naively agreed to write application manuals for his first
employer in the early 1980s. He has been a technical editor for
MacMillan Press and has been teaching system administrators about
documentation for the past eight years. Mike has an Honours Degree in
Science from the University of Melbourne. After a number
of years working as Senior Partner and head of the Security Practice
for Cybersource Pty Ltd, Mike returned to his alma mater, the University
of Melbourne. He now divides his time between teaching software
engineering, providing expert testimony in computer security matters,
and trying to complete a Doctorate. In his ever-diminishing spare time,
Mike is a caffeine addict and photographer.
Andrew Cowie (R7) is a management consultant working in the operations and
infrastructure space.
Andrew is a longtime UNIX and Linux user, and, somewhat unusually, was an
infantry officer in the Canadian army, having graduated from Royal
Military College with a degree in engineering physics. He saw service
across North America and a peacekeeping tour in Bosnia. He later ran
operations for an Internet startup in Manhattan building communities via SMS and was a part of recovering
the company after the September 11 attacks. Andrew is now based in Sydney, Australia, and works with clients worldwide.
Lee Damon (S8, F3) has a B.S. in Speech Communication from Oregon State University. He
has been a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE
since its inception. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment
at IBM Watson Research and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream
Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently leading the development effort
for the Nikola project at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering
department. He is past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups and he chaired LISA '04.
Tina Darmohray (S3) is the Stanford Information Security Officer.
Previously she spent a decade
as a consultant specializing in the
area of computer and network security. Prior to that she was the
lead for the UNIX support team at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory. Darmohray was a founding board member of the System
Administrators Guild, SAGE. She is the author of the popular SAGE
Job Descriptions booklet. She holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from the
University of California, Berkeley.
Jacob Farmer (T9) is a well-known figure in the data storage industry. He has
authored numerous papers and articles and is a regular speaker at trade
shows and conferences. In addition to his regular expert advice column
in the "Reader I/O" section of InfoStor Magazine, the leading trade
magazine of the data storage industry, Jacob also serves as the
publication's senior technical advisor. Jacob has over 18 years of
experience with storage technologies and is the CTO of Cambridge
Computer Services, a national integrator of data storage and data
protection solutions.
Rik Farrow (S1, M1) provides UNIX and Internet security consulting and training. He has been working with UNIX system security since 1984 and with TCP/IP networks since 1988. He has taught at the IRS, Department of Justice, NSA, NASA, US West, Canadian RCMP, Swedish Navy, and for many U.S. and European user groups. He is the author of UNIX System Security, published by Addison-Wesley in 1991, and System Administrator's Guide to System V (Prentice Hall, 1989). Farrow is the editor of ;login: and a network security columnist for Network magazine. Rik lives with his family in the high desert of northern Arizona and enjoys hiking and mountain biking when time permits.
Æleen Frisch (M3) has been a system administrator for over 20 years. She currently
looks after a pathologically heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows
systems. She is the author of several books, including Essential
System Administration (now in its 3rd edition).
Peter Baer Galvin (M2, T12) is the Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies, Inc., a systems integrator and VAR, and was the Systems Manager for Brown University's Computer Science Department. He has written articles
for Byte and other magazines. He wrote the "Pete's Wicked World" and
"Pete's Super Systems" columns at SunWorld. He is currently
contributing editor for Sys Admin, where he manages the Solaris
Corner. Peter is co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts textbooks. As a consultant and trainer, Peter has taught tutorials on security and system administration and has given talks at many conferences and institutions on such topics as Web
services, performance tuning, and high availability.
John Gannon (M4) has over ten years of experience architecting and
implementing UNIX, Linux, and Windows infrastructures. John has
worked in network engineering, operations, and professional services
roles with various companies including Sun Microsystems, University
of Pennsylvania, Scient Corporation, and FOX Sports. John's current
work at VMware involves delivering server consolidation, disaster
recovery, and virtual infrastructure solutions to FORTUNE 500
clients.
Geoff Halprin (F4) has spent over 25 years as a software developer, system administrator, consultant, and troubleshooter. He has written software from system management tools to mission-critical billing systems, has built and run networks for enterprises
of all sizes, and has been called upon to diagnose problems in every aspect of computing infrastructure and software. He has spent more years troubleshooting other
people's systems and programs than he cares to remember. Geoff is a member of the
USENIX board of directors.
Trent R. Hein (T3) is co-founder of Applied Trust Engineering, a leader in holistic infrastructure and security. Trent worked on the 4.4
BSD port to the MIPS architecture at Berkeley, is co-author of both
the UNIX Systems Administration Handbook and the Linux Administration
Handbook, and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University
of Colorado.
Deryck Hodge (M11) is the current Webmaster for
https://www.samba.org/ and https://news.samba.org. He has been instrumental is redesigning Samba's
Web site to adhere to Web standards and follows
similar pursuits while working for the Auburn
University Libraries IT department.
Joshua Jensen (S7, T2) has worked for IBM and Cisco Systems, and was Red Hat's
first instructor, examiner, and
RHCE. He worked with Red Hat for four and a half
years, during which he wrote and maintained large parts of the Red Hat
curriculum: Networking Services and Security, System Administration,
Apache and Secure Web Server Administration, and the Red Hat Certified
Engineer course and exam. Joshua has been working with Linux since
1996 and finds himself having come full circle: he recently left IBM to work
with Red Hat Linux for Cisco Systems. In his spare time he dabbles in
cats, fish, boats, and frequent flyer miles.
Tom Limoncelli (T5, R5), author of O'Reilly's Time Management for System Administrators and co-author of The Practice of System and Network
Administration
from Addison-Wesley, is Director of IT Services at Cibernet Corp. A sysadmin and network wonk since 1987, he
has worked at Dean for America, Lumeta, Bell Labs/Lucent, Mentor Graphics, and Drew
University. He is a frequent presenter at LISA conferences.
Evan Marcus (W4, W7) joined Archivas, Inc., in 2005 as a Senior Systems Engineer in
the Office of the CTO. He has more than 15 years of experience in UNIX systems. Before
joining Archivas, he spent 8 years at VERITAS Software, as a systems
engineer, speaker, and author. He also spent 5 years at Sun
Microsystems, and 2+ years at Fusion Systems, where he worked to
bring the first high availability software applications for SunOS
and Solaris to market. He also spent 2 years as a system administrator
on the equities trading floor of a multinational trading institution. He is the co-author of Blueprints for High Availability from John Wiley & Sons and co-author and co-editor
of The Resilient Enterprise from VERITAS Publications. He is a
well-regarded and popular speaker on the design of highly available
and disaster resilient systems, and on fixed-content storage archives.
James Mauro (S2) is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Performance and Availability Engineering group at
Sun Microsystems. Jim's
current interests and
activities are centered on benchmarking Solaris 10 performance,
workload analysis, and tool development. This work includes Sun's
new Opteron-based systems and multicore performance on Sun's Chip
Multithreading (CMT) Niagara processor. Jim resides in Green Brook,
New Jersey, with his wife and two sons. He spent most of his spare
time in the past year working on the second edition of Solaris
Internals. Jim co-authored the first edition of Solaris Internals
with Richard McDougall and has been writing about Solaris in various
forums for the past eight years.
Ned McClain (T3), co-founder and CTO of Applied Trust Engineering, lectures
around the globe on applying cutting-edge technology in production computing
environments. Ned holds a B.S. in Computer Science from
Cornell University and is a contributing author of both
the UNIX Systems Administration Handbook and the Linux Administration
Handbook.
Richard McDougall (S2), had he lived 100 years ago, would have had the hood
open on the first four-stroke internal combustion gasoline-powered
vehicle, exploring new techniques for making improvements. He would be
looking for simple ways to solve complex problems and helping
pioneering owners understand how the technology works to get the most
from their new experience. These days, McDougall uses technology to
satisfy his curiosity. He is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun
Microsystems, specializing in operating systems technology and system
performance. He is co-author of Solaris Internals (Prentice Hall PTR, 2000) and Resource Management (Sun Microsystems Press, 1999).
John Nicholson (S3) is an attorney with the firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. He
assists clients in structuring
and negotiating technology deals,
including software licensing, technology services, and outsourcing.
Before joining Shaw Pittman, he was the acting IT director for a
mid-size company and was the project manager for the
company's Oracle implementation. He is a regular
contributor to ;login: Engineering group at and holds a J.D./M.B.A. from
Vanderbilt University and a B.A. from Williams College.
W. Curtis Preston (M10) is VP of Data Protection for Glasshouse, a storage
consulting firm focused on bridging the gap between the business and
storage products. Curtis has twelve years of experience in designing
storage systems for many environments, both large and small. As a
recognized expert in the field, Curtis has advised the major product
vendors regarding product features and implementation methods. Curtis
is the administrator of the NetBackup and NetWorker FAQs and answers
the "Ask The Experts" backup forum on SearchStorage.com. He is also
the author of O'Reilly's UNIX Backup & Recovery and Using SANs & NAS,
the co-author of the SAGE Short Topics booklet Backups and
Recovery, and a contributing editor to Storage Magazine.
David Rhoades (S9, M14, T13) is a principal consultant with Maven Security
Consulting, Inc. Since 1996, David has provided information protection services
for various FORTUNE 500 customers. His work has taken him across the U.S.
and abroad to Europe and Asia, where he has lectured and consulted in
various areas of information security. David has a B.S. in computer
engineering from the Pennsylvania State University and has taught
for the SANS Institute, the MIS Training Institute, and ISACA.
Chip Salzenberg (M9, M13) is a well-known figure in the Perl and free/open source
communities. Chip's been working with, and on, free and open source
software for 20 years, and specifically Perl for over 15 years. In 1996
and 1997, Chip was project manager ("pumpking") for Perl 5.4, a release
widely praised for its high quality. Chip teaches and has been published
on Perl and other subjects. During the day he masquerades as a
mild-mannered, spam-fighting programmer at Cloudmark, Inc.; but his secret
identity is Architect of the Parrot virtual machine.
John Sellens (S5, M5, T11) has been involved in system and network administration since 1986 and is
the author of several related USENIX papers, a number of ;login: articles, and the SAGE Short Topics in System Administration booklet #7, System and Network Administration for Higher Reliability. He holds an M.Math. in computer science from the University of Waterloo and is a chartered accountant. He is the proprietor of SYONEX, a systems and networks consultancy. From 1999 to 2004, he was the General Manager for Certainty Solutions in Toronto. Prior to joining Certainty, John was the Director of Network Engineering at UUNET Canada and was a staff member in computing and information technology at the University of Waterloo for 11 years.
Abe Singer (S4, M7) is a Computer Security Researcher in the Security Technologies
Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. In his operational security
responsibilities, he participates in incident response and forensics
and in improving the SDSC logging infrastructure. His research is in
pattern analysis of syslog data for data mining. He is co-author of
of the SAGE booklet Building a Logging Infrastructure and author of a forthcoming O'Reilly book on log analysis.
Marc Staveley (W2) works with Soma Networks, where he is applying his many years of experience with UNIX development and administration in
leading their IT group. Previously Marc had been an independent
consultant and also held positions at Sun Microsystems, NCR,
Princeton University, and the University of Waterloo. He is a
frequent speaker on the topics of standards-based development,
multi-threaded programming, system administration, and performance
tuning.
Theodore Ts'o (R4) has been a Linux kernel developer since almost the very
beginnings of Linux: he implemented POSIX job control in the
0.10 Linux kernel. He is the maintainer and author of the Linux COM
serial port driver and the Comtrol Rocketport driver, and he architected
and implemented Linux's tty layer. Outside of the kernel, he is
the maintainer of the e2fsck filesystem consistency checker. Ted
is currently employed by IBM Linux Technology Center.