David N. Blank-Edelman (S11, M4) 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 LISA '05 Program Chair.

Mark Burgess (R3) is a professor at Oslo University College and is the author of cfengine. He has been researching the principles of network and system administration for over ten years and is the author of Principles of Network and System Administration (John Wiley & Sons). He is frequently invited to speak at conferences.

 
Gerald Carter (S6, T6, W3) 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.

Heison Chak (M6) is a system and network administrator who works for SOMA Networks, focusing on network management and performance analysis of data and voice networks. Heison has been an active member of the Asterisk community. He started delivering tutorials at USENIX conferences and contributing articles to ;login: in 2004.

Tom Christiansen (T4) 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 (S7, S12, M7) 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.

Lee Damon (M7, T8) 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.

Mark-Jason Dominus (S4, S9) has been programming in Perl since 1992. He is a moderator of the comp.lang.perl.moderated newsgroup, the author of the Text::Template, Tie::File, and Memoize modules, a contributor to the Perl core, and author of the perlreftut man page. His work on the Rx regular expression debugger won the 2001 Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, daughter, and several plush octopuses.

Jacob Farmer (S5, S10) is the CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, a specialized integrator of backup systems and storage networks. He has over 15 years of experience with storage technologies and writes an expert advice column for InfoStor magazine. He is currently writing a book on storage networking.
 

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 US 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 writes a column for ;login: and a network security column 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 (W5) 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 (S8, M3, T3) 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.

Geoff Halprin (S13, T8) 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 was on the board of the System Administrators Guild (SAGE) and is now a member of the USENIX board of directors.

Joshua Jensen (T5) has worked for IBM and Cisco Systems and was Red Hat's first instructor, examiner, and RHCE. At Red Hat, 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 is now employed by IBM while working with Red Hat Linux onsite at Cisco Systems. In his spare time he dabbles in cats, fish, boats, and frequent flyer miles.

Charlie Kaufman (M2) is Security Architect for the Common Language Runtime group at Microsoft. He is editor of the new Internet Key Exchange (IKEv2) protocol for the IPsec working group of IETF. He has contributed to a number of IETF standards efforts, including chairing the Web Transaction Security WG and serving as a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). He served on the National Academy of Sciences expert panel that wrote the book Trust in Cyberspace. He was previously a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, where he was Chief Security Architect for Lotus Notes and Domino, and before that Network Security Architect for Digital. He holds over 25 patents in the fields of computer security and computer networking. He is coauthor of Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World (Prentice Hall, 2002).

James Mauro (T2, W2) is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Performance and Availability Engineering group at Sun Microsystems. Jim's current projects are focused on quantifying and improving enterprise platform availability, including minimizing recovery times for data services and Solaris. Jim co-developed a framework for system availability measurement and benchmarking and is working on implementing this framework within Sun.

Ned McClain (S3), 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 (T2, W2) is a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer who specializes in operating systems technology and system performance. He is based at the Menlo Park Performance and Availability Engineering group, where he drives development of performance and behavior enhancements to the Solaris operating system and Sun's hardware architectures. He has led the development of resource management principles, has contributed to the development of virtual memory and file systems within the Solaris operating system, and has architected many tools for analysis, monitoring, and capacity planning. He is the lead author of Resource Management (Prentice Hall). He has written numerous articles and papers on measurement, monitoring, and capacity planning of Solaris systems and frequently speaks at industry and customer technical conferences on the topics of system performance and resource management.

Radia Perlman (M2) is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. She is known for her contributions to bridging (spanning tree algorithm) and routing (link state routing), as well as security (sabotage-proof networks). She is the author of Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols and co-author of Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, two of the top ten networking reference books, according to Network Magazine. She is one of the twenty-five people whose work has most influenced the networking industry, according to Data Communications Magazine. She has about fifty issued patents, an S.B. and S.M. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and an honorary doctorate from KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

Marcus Ranum (M8) Chief Security Officer at Tenable Security, Inc., and a world-renowned expert on security system design and implementation. He is recognized as the inventor of the proxy firewall and the implementer of the first commercial firewall product. Since the late 1980s, he has designed a number of groundbreaking security products, including the DEC SEAL, the TIS firewall toolkit, the Gauntlet firewall, and NFR's Network Flight Recorder intrusion detection system. He has been involved in every level of operations of a security product business, from developer, to founder and CEO of NFR. Marcus has served as a consultant to many FORTUNE 500 firms and national governments, as well as serving as a guest lecturer and instructor at numerous high-tech conferences. In 2001, he was awarded the TISC Clue award for service to the security community, and he holds the ISSA lifetime achievement award.

David Rhoades (R1) 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 US 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.

John Sellens (T7, W4) 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.

Theodore Ts'o (M5) 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.