User:Dan Nessett

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

I am a retired computer scientist who is now pursuing interests for which I had little time while employed. A rough clue to my age: I was born in the early morning of Dec. 6, 1946. A rough clue to my location: I live in Fremont, California. I am a member of the Management Council and Technical Staff.

I graduated from Oregon State University in December, 1967 with a B.S. in mathematics. After a stint in the Army, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Washington State University in 1974. I was a research fellow at the Australian National University from 1973-1977, where I worked on intermediate computer languages (no longer a hot topic) and computer performance evaluation. In May, 1977 I left ANU and accepted a position at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (then part of the University of California). I remained there until 1994, focusing mainly on network and distributed systems security. I participated in the design and implementation of LINCS, a distributed operating system that was in production at LLNL for about 5 years. During this time I was invited to join the Internet Privacy Task Force, which at that time was a peer of the IETF. When the IETF changed its role and became a standards making body, the PTF became the Privacy and Security Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force. While a member of the PSRG, I participated in the design of Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), the first Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standards and led the creation of the Internet Society's Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). Also during this period I worked on ways of improving buffer allocation performance on network offload devices, which ideas were used in Network Systems Corporation products. From 1978-1984 I was a lecturer in the U.C. Davis Graduate Group in Computer Science. I taught courses on operating systems, unix internals, networking, and distributed systems. Around 1989, at the end of the cold war, I was encouraged to expand my professional focus. I worked on distributed numerical simulations and development tools for distributed computing (e.g., distributed make, a programming language embedded in C for implementing Remote Operation Service based applications). I also participated on the committee that produced the first Message Passing Interface (MPI1) standard.

I left LLNL in 1994 and went to Sun Microsystems. While there I worked in the Solaris ONC group, where I architected the use of Kerberos in NFS. I also contributed to the security of NEO, Sun's still-born CORBA product offering. While working on NEO I participated in the development of CORBA's first security standard. In 1996 I joined 3Com as a member of the Technology Development Group, a small skunk works. At 3Com I contributed to the design of network login (which was the basis for the IEEE 802.1x standard) and created the concept and led prototype development of the multilayer firewall, which was the basis for 3Com's distributed embedded firewall product. I also provided internal consulting services to 3Com's product divisions. In 2001 I left 3Com and became an independent consultant. I provided services for two startups, Orative Corporation and Arroyo Video Solutions. Both were subsequently purchased by Cisco.

I retired in 2004 and now concentrate on composing music, studying physics, editing and writing for my church's newsletter, and generally enjoying myself. I have composed and (non-commercially) recorded 10 CDs of music. While studying general relativity I wrote a simulation (in Octave with supporting C code) to calculate the trajectories of objects in the vicinity of a black hole. I am now working on tools for referencing and footnoting in Mediawiki based wikis that work well across multiple wiki pages.

My Sandboxes

Technical work