I can't figure out what's happened here. It sounds like this was a reply to something, yet I don't see any sign of that.
So anyways. Fine. Hi. I'm Joe Greco. I'm one of those people who works in the background to make stuff run and create new cool stuff.
Back in the '80's-'90's, I ran Milwaukee's longest-lasting Public Access UNIX system, a way for people to log in over dialup and access e-mail and USENET in the days before the commercial Internet. By day, I worked on a team of software developers and was the lone systems software engineer hacking on Solaris for a medical devices manufacturer in order to get a custom version that could reliably boot in less than a minute, for use in a next generation operating room monitor (which became the
GE Solar 8000).
The Sun gear was all too expensive, so when 386BSD and FreeBSD came along, I was all over it especially to use as dialup terminal servers, something the Sun gear was horribly bad at. Around this time (~1992-1993), the possibility of public Internet access became possible, and since I had been supporting academic sites, I became active in helping the first generation of Internet Service Providers spring into existence, using FreeBSD to do all sorts of infrastructure such as routing. The printer stand in my office is an Ascend GRF 400, one of the first wire-speed forward-in-silicon routers that at one time handled about half of all traffic in southern Wisconsin destined for the Internet - and it ran BSD. During this time, my electronics shop evolved into more of a server-oriented computer tech shop. I don't usually buy prebuilts from HP or Dell or whatever, because their offerings usually do not align well with the requirements I usually have. As the owner of my companies, I am both the guy spec'cing the servers and signing the checks, so the boss, well, he knows when things can be done cheaper, so unlike a lot of companies where finance just pays the bills and lets the engineers do as they please, I tend to have a focus on budget consciousness and smart choices.
On the software side of things, I did a bunch of interesting things. Because of my USENET work, I contributed the first implementation of noatime to FreeBSD, which was awful enough (as it was just an #ifdef 0 type of hack) to shame the filesystem team into doing it right. I leveraged my expertise with unconventional UNIX designs to create a floppy-based version of FreeBSD that could be booted on diskless PC's to turn them into Xterminals.
Andrzej Bialecki took my design and
hammered it into PicoBSD, which enjoyed success for a number of years. I therefore like to think I am the godfather of appliance-ified FreeBSD's.
On the hardware side of things, I provided Newshosting with a design for 24-drive-in-4U SATA storage. It's hard to remember that there was a time when 24-in-4 was not a thing, but it used to be very difficult to get large amounts of storage attached to a host. I gave a talk at SANE 2000 about building scalable USENET architectures with the Diablo Usenet package, which I'm also a primary developer of, which left a bit of a void because the mass storage aspect wasn't really cheaply available at the time; we were still doing massive piles of SCSI drives, which interestingly enough was the genesis of the solnet-array-test-v2 tool that rattles around these forums. But meanwhile back in the shop I was tinkering with large-scale cheap SATA storage, and getting that reliably working with FreeBSD. When I did this, it suddenly became possible to attach 24 x 250GB drives (6TB) to the network as USENET spool for the low low price of $11,395 -- and this changed things. Until this point, USENET providers had been using pricey SAN storage arrays or SCSI-and-NFS solutions, and among USENET providers there had been a bit of "DSW" about who had the most retention. Suddenly, with the advent of both the software and hardware to cheaply and rapidly expand, Newshosting suddenly burst out head and shoulders in front of the other providers, and the retention wars were truly on.
My customers are generally service providers. One of my companies provided outsourced USENET operations; for example, for 15 years we provided Level(3)'s USENET service. They're one of the largest IP networks on the planet. 15 years is several eons in Internet time, and that amazes me. I also do a lot of design, consulting, management and administration of infrastructure and stuff.
I spend a lot of time hacking on infrastructure stuff these days. In addition to maintaining SOL's networks, I'm donating a lot of resources to support NTP.ORG, which is a
vital and underfunded resource that is critical to the operation of the modern Internet. I've also spent a fair bit of time shaking down companies that might owe me a favor or two, encouraging them to donate resources to NTF. I maintain a toolset that creates hardened FreeBSD hosts in a reproducible fashion, and compartmentalized versions of applications such as web servers, SQL servers, DNS servers, etc., in order to be able to rapidly and reproducibly build infrastructure systems that are both reliable and secure.
You might notice that FreeNAS is at the intersection of several of my interests. I use FreeNAS for some fileserver uses when more complex things like Samba or Netatalk are involved, because I don't like dealing with the bugs and interop issues. But I also build lots of standalone NFS servers.
I spend a lot of time here trying to bring a lifetime's worth of professional experience to the forums, because it's probably scary when you're a hobbyist or newbie of some sort to be faced with something like FreeNAS.
Anyways there's a lot of other crap in there along the way, but I've tried to limit this to stuff that is tangential to FreeNAS somehow.
Hope you found that interesting.
