Building Secure Servers with Linux

Acknowledgments

For the most part, my writing career has centered on describing how to implement and use software that I didn’t write. I am therefore much indebted to and even a little in awe of the hundreds of outstanding programmers who create the operating systems and applications I use and write about. They are the rhinoceroses whose backs I peck for insects.

As if I weren’t beholden to those programmers already, I routinely seek and receive first-hand advice and information directly from them. Among these generous souls are Jay Beale of the Bastille Linux project, Ron Forrester of Tripwire Open Source, Balazs “Bazsi” Scheidler of Syslog-ng and Zorp renown, and Renaud Deraison of the Nessus project.

Special thanks go to Dr. Wietse Venema of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for reviewing and helping me correct the SMTP chapter. Not to belabor the point, but I find it remarkable that people who already volunteer so much time and energy to create outstanding free software also tend to be both patient and generous in returning email from complete strangers.

Bill Lubanovic wrote the section on djbdns in Chapter 4, and all of Chapter 6, — brilliantly, in my humble opinion. Bill has added a great deal of real-world experience, skill, and humor to those two chapters. I could not have finished this book on schedule (and its web security chapter, in particular, would be less convincing!) without Bill’s contributions.

I absolutely could not have survived juggling my day job, fatherly duties, ...