Hi, welcome to my personal page. I am Rainer Gerhards, chief software
engineer at Adiscon. I am a bit paranoid, so please do not expect too much
personal on this page (just the essentials you will find on the web anyhow;)). The main aim of
this page is to provide some of my
professional background and serve as a bucket for pointers to interesting
content I have created. I have recently started a
syslog blog, so if you are up for
news on this boring issue, this might be the right place for you.
I am in the IT field since 1983. I have started as a software developer, than
turned into a data center guy and then into a data center guy building local
area networks. For some years, I have served as a consultant, often as a
consultant doing some custom programming. This was an enjoable time, but I am
back to pure software development for some years now. Occasionally, I do some
consulting, but that's more for the fun of it. During all those years, I was
always working close to the system level.
For those interested in these nasty things: I was one of the first CNEs and
MCNEs over here (yes, that was Drake portable testing in the beginning, coming
once a month to the Novell headquarter...). I also was one of the first Windows
NT MCPs, which was quite funny at that time. I am now no longer certified for
either, simply because it is not relevant enough to what I am currently doing
(and, honestly, I do not really find it important enough...).
I am a member of the ACM, the
German Informatics Society,
the ISOC, and the
IETF
syslog working
group.
I live in the lovely village of
Grossrinderfeld, close to Frankfurt, Nürnberg and Stuttgart. In my personal
life, I am a hobby astronomer, interested in all kinds of nature sciences and
like to travel. I also try to make everyday living a bit better. In my small
environment over here, I try to help out with community work in our small
village. I also support a group of
gifted children's parents (site in German). If you know a little German, you
can also visit my personal web site.
Among others, that site contains my german-language pages on the
Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn
as well as an astronomy and space
newsletter specifically targeted to kids.
I can be contacted at rgerhards at
adiscon.com.
I am also a (somewhat) frequent blogger, both in english as well as in german.
This page is currently under construction.
And as I know myself, it will probably stay in this state for quite some while...
Open Source Projects I am involved in
- rsyslog - an enhanced syslogd for
Linux and BSD natively supporting MySQL and syslog/tcp
- liblogging - an easy to use logging
library for RFC 3195 compliant applications
- phpLogCon - a web interface to
syslog data (not my best project ;))
Publications
Many of my publications and talks below are in German
language. For these, I have quoted the orginal German titles and also used
German format.
- Using
Header Files To Enhance Portability, C User's Journal, January 1990
- Modulare Fileserver (mit NetWare), PC-Magazin, 22. April
1992, S. 48ff
- Anatomie einer Mailbox-Einführung, BTS (Basten Verlag),
Juli/August 1992, S. 27ff
- Praxisanforderungen an ein modernes Bürokommunikationssystem,
PC-Magazin, 21. Oktober 1992, S. 50
- Verwaltung heterogener Netze überfordert Netz und Anwender
(Netzwerk-Management), Computerwoche, 8. Januar 1993, S. 17f
- Einfache, effiziente und Schnelle Kommunikation mit Herstellern (Compuserve
in der Praxis), PC-Magazin, 10. Februar 1993, S. 62ff
- Zuverlässigkeit und Stabilität geht vor Benutzerfreundlichkeit
(3270-Emulationen unter Windows), PC-Magazin, 17. März 1993, S. 60ff
- Standardisierung fördert die Produktivität (PC-Einsatzkonzepte),
PC-Magazin, 21. April 1993, S. 52ff
- Was ist bei Einsatz von PC-Standardsoftware zu beachten?
(Das europäische Software-Lizenzrecht und seine Auswirkungen für den
Anwender), VDMA-Schriftenreihe "Informatik", J. K. Kottenbrink, J. Busse, H.
Frey, R. Gerhards, L. Heinken, B. Krumme, R. Pesek, M. Schwarz, R. Sperl, B.
Stampp, Wessendorf, Februar 1994
- Lessons learned from the SQL Slammer worm, January 2003,
http://www.monitorware.com/Common/en/Articles/SQLSlammer-Learnings.php
- The Needle in the Haystack - or how to approach log data,
February 2003,
http://www.monitorware.com/en/workinprogress/Needle-in-Haystack.php
- Remotely Monitoring IIS Log Files, Rainer Gerhards & Dr. Tina
Bird, March 2003,
http://www.monitorware.com/Common/en/SecurityReference/Monitoring-IIS-Logs.pdf
- On the Nature of Syslog Data, March 2004,
http://www.monitorware.com/en/workinprogress/nature-of-syslog-data.php
- syslog-protocol,
an IETF Internet-Draft specifying the core syslog protocol format, so far
June 2005 (to be updated)
Talks I have given
- Geschichte einer Windows-Einführung - Hintergründe, Methoden und
Bewertungen, VDMA, Tagung "PC im Maschinenbau '92", 1992-09-16
- Netzmanagement im Mittelstand, Networld Europe, Frankfurt,
1993-05-26
- Transition to NetWare 4.x - A Review of Features and Benefits,
1-day Tutorial, Networld+Interop, Frankfurt, Germany, 1995-05-31
- Content-Scanning mit Sybari Antigen,
Viren-Informations-Sicherheits-Tage (VIST), Neustadt a. d. Weinstraße,
Germany, 2002-11-23
- Layered Syslog Architecture,
59th IETF Conference,
Seoul, Korea, March 2004 (talk given by Chris Lonvick as proxy),
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/04mar/slides/syslog-1.pdf
- Logfile-Auswertung, Viren-Informations-Sicherheits-Tage (VIST),
Sasbachwalden, 2004-11-26
- Neue Entwicklungen in Syslog,
LinuxTag 2005 conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, 2005-06-24
- rsyslog: going up from 40K messages per second to 250K,
Conference Paper Linux Kongress 2010, Nuremberg, Germany, 2010-09-24
I have wrangled with quite some IT systems since I started in this business.
Some of them are long-forgotten, but I really like all of them. Among others, I
have worked with
- IBM Mainframes (VM, VSE, CMS, CICS, SNA)
- Unisys Mainframes(OS 1100, TIP, CMS, DMS 1100)
- Bull GCOS/HVX
- Unix (e. g. AIX, SCO) and Linux
- Network Technology (Physical Layer, Protocols & Applications)
- Software Development (all important languages)
- Novell NetWare and NDS
- Microsoft Operating Systems and Backoffice
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