Acknowledgments

Many people made this book possible. First and foremost I wish to thank Radia Perlman, whose foresight turned lemons into the lemonade that is this book. Mary Franz, at Prentice Hall, made the idea a reality with tireless support and enthusiasm . Thanks also to Anne Garcia, Noreen Regina and Dmitri Korzh for helping me bring it all together. Additionally, thanks to Scott Mann, Ellen Mitchell, Matthew Crosby, and Gretchen Phillips who reviewed the material and consistently had helpful feedback.

A number of colleagues deserve thanks for their useful input and suggestions, including Matt Braun and Jon Rochils, as well as the entire Network Operations staff at MIT, especially Jeff Schiller and Bob Mahoney. Thanks to Marc Horowitz for the use of his tcpdump parsing script and Ted Ts'o for writing the foreword.

Thanks to all the friends whose support kept me going, including Ron Hoffmann, Erin Panttaja, Sola Grantham, Stephen Gildea, Anne LaVin, Jon Rochils, Jag Patel, Marc Tanner, Gisele Proulx, Edmund Golaski, Stan Zanarotti, and Karen Atkinson. Thanks to Mark and Dawna Nocera for the much needed weekly distractions that kept me on my toes. Thanks also to friends at the home away from home, especially Buff Weigand and Cannie Shafer. A special thank you goes to Rebecca Rogers, Penny Kulp and Tara Holm for keeping everything in perspective and for patience in listening to each excruciating detail along the way.

Many thanks to my brother Tom and my mother Barbara for their encouragement and enthusiasm throughout the project and for putting up with my crazy hours.

Finally, those who truly deserve acknowledgment are the many Open Source software developers whose labor of love has produced not only the subject matter of this book, but also the software that quietly keeps much of the Internet up and running. Keep at it!

The author would be happy to receive feedback with suggestions for improvements or corrections to mistakes. Send email to [e-mail]. This book was written using LATEX, based on templates created by J. Kenneth Shultis.

James M. Kretchmar