Welcome to Kurt Lidl's Home Page

Kurt Lidl makes no claims about the content, correctness or applicability of any of the information contained in any of these web pages. So there.

• Dev Null Articles
• Links to Interesting Places
• NSFAQs
• Projects
• Sausage Specialty Drinks

Non-Personal Information

• My day job is currently (Spring, 2004) performing independent computer consulting for Pix.Com Technologies, LLC -- a greater Washington D.C. area based computer networking and software development company that I founded in 2004. If you want to hire a consultant with extensive Internet operational experience and software development experience, feel free to contact me.
• Before founding Pix.Com Technologies, I worked for the Internet Software Consortium, a California based, not-for-profit software development and support organization, which happens to be headquartered in Redwood City, California. Since I worked for them, they have changed their name to be the Internet Systems Corporationand have become a US Federal 501(C) not-for-profit organization. I worked on both on backend software to support domain registries and did a little work at trying to speed up the performance of BIND 9 and get better statistics gathering code in place.
• Prior to ISC, I worked for Zero Millimeter LLC, a consulting company that I co-founded with Chris Ross and Dave MacKenzie. We did networking design, implementation and tuning. We also did product and tailored services design for discriminating customers. Some of these services are still available through my new consulting company.
• I was the primary author on a paper about the BSD/OS IPFW system. This was published as part of the proceedings of the BSDCON 2002 conference, held in San Francisco during February 2002. The BSD/OS IPFW system is a fully programmable, in-kernel filtering system that is a powerful extension to the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) found in many BSD systems. The paper describes the system in some detail, along with some small example filters.
• In what seems to have been several lifetimes ago, I used to work for UUNET Technologies, Inc. I used to run the software research and development group there. I left UUNET in January of 2001. When I left UUNET, it was no longer the same company it was when I started working for them, way back in May 1992. A lot of the company culture changed during the period of time that I worked there, with several mergers and acquisitions drastically changing the corporate landscape. UUNET no longer exists as a separate company -- its identity has been thoroughly erased by it's acquisition by MFS, then Worldcom, the Worldcom/MCI merger, and Worldcom's subsequent fraud-fueled decent into bankruptcy and re-emergence as MCI. Oh well, you can't win them all. There were about 30 people at UUNET when I started working there. At its height of power, UUNET had there were several thousand people working in Northern Virgina alone. There were thousands more in the various operating companies that are spread around the world. Of course the number of people working for MCI has greatly decreased. Before, during and after the bankruptcy process, the company has laid off many employees as they struggle for profitability. It is interesting to watch, just as watching a train wreck is interesting.
• I helped write IETF RFC 2516 -- which defines the protocol known as PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet). This was published as an informational RFC in early 1999. It describes a simple encapsulation method for PPP frames so they can be transmitted over an Ethernet. This technology is of interest for many cable modem and xDSL providers. In many parts of North America, it is impossible to get a consumer DSL connection without using PPPoE, for better or worse. Even some wireless providers, and fiber to the premises operators use PPPoE.
• I addressed the 40th IETF (in Washington, D.C.) about further developments in multicast USENET news. I described a system known as MNNP, which is a USENET news distribution system that that my software group was researching at the time. We unfortunately never had a software release of this system -- most of our efforts were spent in working on exploration of technologies needed to make the entire system viable. There are many difficult areas that need to be addressed to make this work ``well'' on the Internet and the existing Mbone. Particular attention must be paid to the concept of goodput -- briefly, the amount of useful data that delivered to clients from a data source in the presence of network congestion, packet drops and packet reordering. It's not nearly as easy as it sounds.
• I was the primary author of paper selected for presentation at the USENIX conference in January 1994. The title of the paper is Drinking from the Firehose: Multicast USENET News. A postscript copy of the paper is available from this web site. The slides that I used for the presentation are available at this site. The client side code that was used for the testing of the system is also available electronically. My co-authors of this paper are Josh Osborne and Joe Malcolm. Josh and Joe wrote the client and server code that is described in the paper. We have have known each other for a really long time. Some people even get us confused. A little known fact -- there is a picture of the the three of us in existence, which proves that we are not the same person. I'm not sure that anyone has ever accused us of being the same person, but I'm sure it is just a matter of time. (In case you were wondering, that's me on the left, Josh in the middle and Joe on the right.)
• I have used the operating system known as BSD/OS (aka the BSD/OS operating system, previously called the BSDi Internet Super Server) for a great many tasks at several different places. Ultimately, I'll have a description about some of the cool things that I have used BSD/OS for, both past and present. I really enjoy using this operating system, you probably would have enjoyed it too. Too bad that Wind River killed this product offering in 2003.
• A long time ago, both Josh Osborne and I worked on what was one of the first hardware based encryption products for a WAN, known as the LanGuardian. The hardware was designed by Pete Hallenbeck, a real wizard at doing board layout and getting the most from a given set of hardware components. UUNET Technologies Inc, the company that built this system, ceased manufacturing of this product years ago, probably in 1998. I have put a collection of information about the LanGuardian on this webserver. I'm not sure this information will really help anybody out or not, but if the information isn't available, it definitely won't help anybody.

Personal Information

• I put a small collection of well known, or at least interesting and funny quotes on my web pages. I hope you find them enjoyable. I know I did.
• I have started a page of musing about database systems and some of the issues that impact on a database system in this day and age.
• Oh, OK. I like coffee. I like it a lot. I have this collection of stuff about coffee elsewhere in my collection of web pages. Maybe you will find something there that you find funny and/or amusing. Then again, maybe not.
• In what seems like a previous life, I used to hack on XTank. XTank is a multi-player, X11 based game, that used to run on a lot of different types of Unix machines. Unfortunately, the state of the art in operating systems has progressed in the intervening years and XTank has kept up with the changing times. I haven't spent a lot of time with it over the last couple of years, as my various day jobs have been keeping me busy. I'll hopefully get around to putting up some more information on XTank on this web server eventually, but don't hold your breath. If you are into arbitrary amounts of pain, you can get the tar file of the latest source code snapshot. However, don't expect a lot of sympathy or help in getting it to work on your machines. This version of the source code doesn't have any documentation in it, so you probably want to grab something like the 1.3f version of the game, which was a full release, with documentation and everything.

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Kurt J. Lidl
lidl at pix dot net
Last Updated: $Date: 2007/12/07 03:22:02 $