About the Authors
Thomas A. Limoncelli
Thomas A. Limoncelli is an independent consultant. Previously Director of Network Operations at Lumeta Corporation, a venture startup that focuses on intranet security. Most of Tom's expertise comes from his seven years at AT&T Bell Labs (later Lucent Bell Labs) where he supported the network used by the researchers and scientists, and lead the effort to separate the Holmdel Bell Labs network between AT&T, Lucent and NCR when the company split into three.
He got his fundamentals from his three years at Mentor Graphics, Corp. Prior to that he was at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey where he received his B.A. in Computer Science.
Outside of work Tom is a grass-roots civil-rights activist, from which he gains experience that directly applies to his career in computers. Tom's first published paper extolled lessons that SAs can learn from activists. His activism has been recognized on the state and national level. Tom doesn't see a much difference between his work and activism careers. They are both about helping people.
Christine Hogan
Christine Hogan is an independent consultant. Christine's system administration career started at the Department of Mathematics in Trinity College Dublin where she worked for almost 5 years. After that, she went in search of sunshine and moved to Sicily working for a year in a research company, and followed that with 5 years in California.
She was the security architect at Synopsys for a couple of years before joining some friends at Global Networking and Computing (GNAC, now Certainty Solutions) a couple of months after it was founded. While there, she worked with start-ups, e-commerce sites, bio-tech companies and large multi-national hardware and software companies. On the technical side she focused on security and networking, working with customers and helping GNAC to establish its data center and Internet connectivity. She also became involved with project management, customer management and people management. After almost three years at GNAC she went out on her own as an independent security consultant, working primarily at e-commerce sites for a few months before returning to a colder climate.
She has recently returned to university and is studying for a PhD in Imperial College, London. She also has a B.A. in Mathematics and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin and a Diploma in Legal Studies from the Dublin Institute of Technology.
How did Tom and Chris meet?
Tom and Chris didn't know each other until days before they started colaborating. In June of 1999, Tom and Chris both happened to be attending the Usenix-sponsored Conference on Network Administration in San Jose, California. Through a chance meeting they learned that they had similar ideas for a book. After some discussion they realized that they had read each other's previous research and had many friends in common. Soon they were collaborating on outlines and a proposal to pitch to publishers. The rest is history!
