John Arrasjid (T1, W1) (VCDX, VCP, ITIL Foundations) is a Principal Architect at VMware, where he has developed tools, training material, design strategies, and content for the VCDX certification program. John is co-author of the SAGE Short Topics booklet Deploying the VMware Infrastructure, which focuses on the VI 3.x environment. John is currently developing a new book, to be titled VMware Architecture Design Patterns: Blueprints for Building the Cloud, scheduled for release in 2009. John has focused his virtualization work on disaster recovery, performance, and security. John has run tutorials on VMware technology at USENIX Annual Technical and LISA conferences since 2005, in the areas of VMware Infrastructure 2/3, performance, and advanced topics. Prior to working at VMware, John held IT consulting, architecture, developer, and management roles at WebNexus, Roxio, 3Dfx, AT&T, and Chronologic Simulation. John holds his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo.

David N. Blank-Edelman (T6, T12, W5, W8) is the Director of Technology at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and the author of the O'Reilly book Automating System Administration with Perl. He has spent the past 25 years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He was the program chair of LISA '05 and was one of the LISA '06 Invited Talks co-chairs.

Mark Burgess (T2) is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, Norway (a member of the EMANICS Network of Excellence) and CTO of Cfengine AS. He is the author of the configuration management system Cfengine and of several books and many papers on the topic, including the SAGE Short Topics booklet A System Engineer's Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, coauthored with Æleen Frisch.

Gerald Carter (R4, R5) has been developing, writing about, and teaching on open source since the late 1990s. He was a member of the Samba Development Team from 1998 to 2009 and authored both the third edition of Using Samba and LDAP System Administration for O'Reilly Publishing. Currently Gerald is employed by Likewise Software as a senior software engineer and the current project lead for Likewise Open. Previously, he held positions at HP and at VA Linux.

D. Brent Chapman (M3) is the founder and manager of the Network-Automation mailing list and the creator of the Netomata Config Generator (NCG) open source software, which automates the generation of coordinated, complete, and correct config files for network devices and services. He has over 20 years of information technology management experience, in organizations large and small, much of it focused on network management and automation. He is the coauthor of the highly regarded O'Reilly & Associates book Building Internet Firewalls and the creator of the Majordomo mailing list management package. In 2004 Brent was honored with the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award "for outstanding sustained contributions to the community of system administrators."

Mike Ciavarella (T9, T15) 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 on computer security matters, and trying to complete a doctorate. In his ever-diminishing spare time, Mike is a caffeine addict and photographer.

Lee Damon (F3) has a BS in Speech Communication from Oregon State University. He has been a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE and LOPSA since their inceptions. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center 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. Among other professional activities, he is a charter member of LOPSA and SAGE and past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups, and he was the chair of LISA '04.

Richard Elling (M5) has been designing and building dependable, networked computer systems to solve complex problems for more than 25 years. He was an early adopter of ZFS and has developed benchmarks and analysis techniques for evaluation of data protection schemes and performability of systems. He wrote Designing Enterprise Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0 (Prentice Hall, 2002) and has authored many white papers, Sun BluePrints, and refereed papers on dependable systems and performability. He is a regular contributor to the ZFS community.

Jacob Farmer (T7, T13) is a well-known figure in the data storage industry. He has written 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 (M8) has been teaching UNIX security classes since 1987. He wrote the second book on UNIX security, as well as hundreds of security-related articles. His experience with Linux security goes back over ten years and has led him to believe that sandboxing applications with SELinux is not just a good idea, but necessary. Rik Farrow is also Editor of ;login:.

Æleen Frisch (S3, R3) has been working as 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 from O'Reilly) and the SAGE Short Topics booklet A System Engineer's Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, coauthored with Mark Burgess. Æleen was the program committee chair for LISA '03 and is a frequent presenter at USENIX events, as well as presenting classes for universities and corporations worldwide.

Peter Baer Galvin (T4, T10, W3, W6) is the Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies, Inc., a systems integrator and VAR. Previously he was the Systems Manager for Brown University's Computer Science Department. Peter is currently a columnist for ;login:. He has written articles for Byte and other magazines, as well as columns for SunWorld and Sys Admin magazines. 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, security, system administration, and high availability.

Steve Holden (W2) is the author of Python Web Programming and the chairman of the Python Software Foundation. His interest in object-oriented programming extends back to the original SmallTalk implementation, but after he discovered Python ten years ago he made it his language of choice for most programming tasks. Steve has over twenty years of experience as an instructor and teacher. He consults for government agencies and private corporations and is a contributing editor to Python Magazine.

Thomas A. Limoncelli (T5, T11) is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His books include The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley) and Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly). He received the SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He works at Google in NYC and blogs at http://EverythingSysadmin.com/.

Jimmy Lin (M4) serves as a consultant for Cloudera and is an associate professor at the University of Maryland. He graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2004. Lin's research lies at the intersection of information retrieval and natural language processing; his current research focuses on cloud computing, in particular, massively-distributed text processing in cluster-based environments.

David J. Malan (S5) is a Lecturer at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D., S.M., and A.B. He now teaches Harvard College's 300-student introductory course in computer science, as well as "Building Dynamic, Scalable Websites" at Harvard Extension School. He also serves as Chief Information Officer for Mindset Media, LLC, where he designed a Web-based infrastructure capable of 500M hits per day with peaks of 10K per second. His research background ranges from cybersecurity and forensics to pedagogy.

Jeanna N. Matthews (F1) is an associate professor of Computer Science at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. Her research interests include virtualization, cloud computing, operating systems, computer networks, and computer security. She has written several popular books, including Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization and Computer Networking: Internet Protocols in Action. At Clarkson she leads several hands-on computing laboratories, including the Clarkson Open Source Institute and Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory. Students in these labs and in her classes have been winners in a number of prestigious computing contests, including the 2001, 2002, and 2004 IBM Linux Challenge, the 2005 IBM North American Grid Scholar's Challenge, the 2005 Unisys Tuxmaster competition, and the 2006 VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge. Jeanna received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999.

James Mauro (S1, M1) 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 coauthored the first edition of Solaris Internals with Richard McDougall and has been writing about Solaris in various forums for the past nine years.

Richard McDougall (R2) is a Principal Engineer and the Chief Performance Architect in the Office of the CTO at VMware. A recognized expert in operating systems, virtualization, performance, resource management, and filesystem technologies, Richard is a frequent speaker and has published several papers and books on these topics. Prior to VMware, most recently he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he wrote the authoritative books Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance and Tools.

David Nalley (M11) has been a systems administrator for 8 years and acted as a consultant for an additional 3 years. David contributes to a number of free software projects, including the Fedora Project and the Sugar Labs 4th grade math project. In the Fedora Project David maintains a number of software packages and is the document lead for the Installation Guide. David is a frequent author on development, sysadmin, and Linux and frequently speaks at IT and F/LOSS conferences.

Tobias Oetiker (M6, M9, T8) is an electrical engineer by education and a system administrator by vocation. For ten years he has been working for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, providing students and staff with a deluxe UNIX workstation environment. In 2006 he started his own company, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, running UNIX servers for industry customers, improving his pet open source projects MRTG, RRDtool, and SmokePing, and applying these tools to solve the customers' problems. In 2006 Tobias received the prestigious SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for his work on MRTG and RRDtool. Find out more about Tobi at http://tobi.oetiker.ch.

Steve Pinkham (T3) is a security researcher for Maven Security Consulting Inc. (http://www.mavensecurity.com). Steve has spent time in system administration, programming, security research, and consulting. He dabbles in electronics and philosophy and enjoys cheese and fine tea. If you're unlucky you might run into him wearing a backpack in some remote corner of the world. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Maurita Plouff (S7) has been translating between technical and nontechnical audiences for more than 30 years, starting with her first technical post as a research assistant in a physics laboratory and continuing in a variety of fields ever since. An accomplished speaker, she is known for her ability to avoid inducing the "glassy-eyed stare." She has been a technologist, manager, corporate subversive, troubleshooter, surveyor, minor executive, semi-pro singer, cartographer, technical geek, consultant, and chef. She holds both B.S. and M.M. degrees and, when in the kitchen, prefers an 8-inch Henckels 4-star knife. Currently, Maurita engages in writing and consulting projects, with a focus on the interface where management and technologists meet.

Bruce Potter (S6) is the founder of The Shmoo Group of security, crypto, and privacy professionals. He helps organize the yearly ShmooCon security conference, held each winter in Washington, DC. Mr. Potter has co-authored several books, including 802.11 Security and Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security published by O'Reilly and Mac OS X Security from New Riders. Mr. Potter is the co-founder of Ponte Technologies, a company specializing in wireless security, IT security operations, and advanced network defense techniques.

David Rhoades (T3) is a senior consultant with Maven Security Consulting Inc. (http://www.mavensecurity.com). Maven Security Consulting is a Delaware corporation which provides information security assessments and training to a global clientele. David's expertise includes Web application security, network security architectures, and vulnerability assessments. Past customers have included domestic and international companies in various industries, as well as US government agencies. David has been active in information security consulting since 1996, when he began his career with the computer security and telephony fraud group at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). David has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University.

Alan Robertson (M2) founded the High Availability Linux (Linux-HA) project in 1998 and has been project leader for it since then. He worked for SuSE for a year, then joined IBM's Linux Technology Center in March 2001, where he works on Linux-HA full-time. Before joining SuSE, he was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. He worked for Bell Labs 21 years in a variety of roles. These included providing leading-edge computing support, writing software tools, and developing voice mail systems. Alan is a frequent speaker at a variety of international open source and Linux conferences.

John Rouillard (S2) has been working in system administration since the early 1990s. His involvement with SEC started at version 1 in the early 2000s. His comments and needs drove a number of the features in the modern SEC. A paper on using SEC he presented at the LISA '04 conference has been referenced by people developing commercial correlation software. He continues to use SEC as a supplemental correlation engine for Nagios and is an active member of the SEC mailing list.

John Sellens (R6) 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 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, and is currently a member of the systems team at Magna International. 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.

Zach Shepherd (F1) is an undergraduate student studying computer science, physics, and mathematics at Clarkson University. At Clarkson, he has collaborated with students and professors on various Xen-related projects, including the setup of a Xen-based infrastructure for the Clarkson Open Source Institute and research in virtualization benchmarking. Zach was a technical reviewer for Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization.

Rupen Sheth (T1, W1) (VCP, ITIL Foundations) is a Worldwide Consulting Services Architect at VMware. Rupen is currently responsible for the technical accuracy, development, and release of numerous materials to enable VMware field consultants and partners to deliver quality services using VMware solutions. Rupen is currently involved in developing service delivery content for vSphere and vCenter management solutions. Rupen is co-author of the book The Path to VMware vSphere—Unleashed and has presented at numerous VMware shows and events. Before joining VMware, Rupen fulfilled numerous consulting, architect, and engineering roles at BearingPoint, Citigroup, American Airlines, and GE Medical Systems. Rupen has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin.

Marc Staveley (S4, T4, T10, W3, W6) is now an independent consultant, applying his years of experience with UNIX development and administration to help clients with server consolidation and application migration projects. Previously Marc held positions at SOMA Networks, Sun Microsystems, NCR, and Princeton University. He is a frequent speaker on standards-based development, multi-threaded programming, system administration, and performance tuning.

Theodore Ts'o (W4, W7) 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.

Rudi Van Drunen (M10) studied electronic engineering and met the UNIX OS and friends about 25 years ago on a DEC VAX at the University of Groningen (NL). Apparently the two got along pretty well, as nowadays he is employed as CTO and senior UNIX infrastructure consultant at Competa IT in the Netherlands. Before that, he was head of IT for a medical lab, where he did UNIX system administration and applied research in image analysis and neural networks. He is one of the tech gurus and a founding board member of Wireless Leiden, the leading wireless community in the Netherlands. Rudi has his own small open source and hardware design company, Xlexit. He has taught a number of classes and given invited talks on wireless and other topics at events such as LISA and SANE and for the Dutch UNIX community.