Linux 2.4 Packet Filtering HOWTO: Who the hell are you, and why are you playing with my kernel?

Next Previous Contents

## 4. Who the hell are you, and why are you playing with my kernel?

I'm Rusty Russell; the Linux IP Firewall maintainer and just another working coder who happened to be in the right place at the right time. I wrote ipchains (see How Do I Packet Filter Under Linux? above for due credit to the people who did the actual work), and learnt enough to get packet filtering right this time. I hope.

WatchGuard, an excellent firewall company who sell the really nice plug-in Firebox, offered to pay me to do nothing, so I could spend all my time writing this stuff, and maintaining my previous stuff. I predicted 6 months, and it took 12, but I felt by the end that it had been done Right. Many rewrites, a hard-drive crash, a laptop being stolen, a couple of corrupted filesystems and one broken screen later, here it is.

While I'm here, I want to clear up some people's misconceptions: I am no kernel guru. I know this, because my kernel work has brought me into contact with some of them: David S. Miller, Alexey Kuznetsov, Andi Kleen, Alan Cox. However, they're all busy doing the deep magic, leaving me to wade in the shallow end where it's safe.

Next Previous Contents