o3 profile: John Buswell

John Buswell is the creator and executive editor of o3 magazine.

by  o3 magazine     

John Buswell is the creator and executive editor of o3 magazine. A graduate of the University of Limerick in Ireland, he is a seasoned professional with over 14 years experience in the IT industry. He is a strong advocate of Free and Open Source Software, he has extensive experience with Layer 2 thru Layer 7 IP Networking and 802.11 Wireless LAN technologies. He is the engineer behind the concept of Zero Day Attack Protection in Linux.

Current Projects

John currently holds a Software Engineering / Consulting position in the Global Product Support group at Nortel, where he works on the Nortel VPN Gateway line of products. He is also the executive editor and core contributor here at o3 magazine. In his spare time he is currently working on a next-generation open source platform for in-car computing and a next-generation Linux virtualization platform for unified computing.

How did he get started with Open Source?

During his first year at the University of Limerick, he lost a bet and had to switch from Windows NT to Linux. He made a bet with Dave Airlie that his Windows NT box was secure. Despite being heavily patched, Dave was able to break into his Windows NT box before John could break into Daves Linux box. Admitting defeat, John installed Slackware and never looked back. Apache was one of the first open source projects he got really involved with outside of the Linux kernel. He moved from Slackware to Red Hat and beyond.

Computer Experience

He started into computers at the early age of 5, when he finished formatting some 5.25" floppy discs under MS-DOS at his dads place of work. It would be a few years before he got near a PC again, but he grew up using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and learned to code thanks to a magazine called INPUT. By the time he was 7 he was coding his own applications in Z80 basic. His parents owned a local computer company, and he quickly picked things up from repairing PC hardware to removing viruses with Norton Disk Editor. He developed a technique of kicking the table to get the old RLL hard drive moving again when it sounded stuck. He moved on to MS-DOS and GW Basic, then on to GEM and eventually Windows 3.1. He remembers when EGA was new and cool. His first exposure to UNIX was the MKS toolkit for DOS. He moved on to Visual Basic and Windows For Workgroups. He was exposed to networking through Novell Netware and NE2000 NICs, telecommunications with modems and Fidonet. He first got access to the Internet thanks to Paul O Mara and Ireland On-Line via a 19k2 modem in 1994. Yes, he used Mosaic before it was Netscape! He has extensive PC hardware experience, he grew up with it, and has maintained pace with it all his life. From 8086/8088 processors all the way up to modern Opteron and Xeon processors. He is a big fan of AMDs L3 cache from the AMD K6-3 days and is really happy about its return in AMDs 2009 offerings.

Professional Experience

John has held Senior Software Engineering and Lead Software Sustaining roles at Nortel, Aruba Networks, Alteon WebSystems Inc, and Mandrakesoft (now Mandriva). At MandrakeSoft he led the porting effort of then Linux-Mandrake on the PowerPC platform. He left MandrakeSoft to work as a Sustaining Engineer at Alteon WebSystems Inc, on their Layer 2 thru Layer 7 switching platform. He remained with the Alteon platform after Nortel purchased the company in 2000. He left Nortel in 2006 to work on the Linux based Enterprise Wireless LAN products offered by Aruba Networks. At Aruba he was responsible for a wide variety of Linux kernel related fixes on both their Access Points and Wireless Controllers, he also contributed many changes to improve the performance of their web based management system. He left Aruba in 2008 to rejoin the team at Nortel to work on the innovative next-generation Application Switch called VSS and to assist with software sustaining on the Nortel Application Switch platform. Following the decision by Nortel to sell the Application Switch platform in Q1 2009, he joined the Nortel VPN Gateway team.

Ventures

John founded Spliced Networks in 2002 to work on a next-generation Linux operating system platform for network and server appliances. By early 2003, Spliced Networks had a working appliance platform called Ion-Linux that ran on both AMD x86-64 and regular i686. Ion-Linux was unique in that the entire OS booted from a single image and did not require installation. By 2004, Spliced Networks had developed its own hardware appliance platform utilzing off-the-shelf AMD Opteron components and ATA to Compact Flash adapters. The platform was renamed to a more appropriate AppOS. This was done because another company - Element Computer had begun to use the name ION Linux for their Linux Desktop platform, and by removing the term Linux from the product name, the company did not need to seek trademark permission from Linuxmark at the time. Spliced Networks continued to develop AppOS and their portfolio of hardware appliances.

By 2005, Spliced Networks decided to postpone the public release of AppOS, to develop a version for the IBM S/390 mainframes. Development continued on AppOS, integrating in support for grsecurity, moving to squashfs for the image system and by late 2005, the concept of software stacks had been integrated into the system. With no marketing budget and knowing Spliced Networks would need to market its product offerings to a wide audience as a software company, John Buswell created o3 magazine, as a means to demonstrate the innovative and thought-leadership of the company. Spliced Networks ended its custom-built hardware appliances in 2006, with the SN-2400 series, a 2U system designed by John Buswell. Following the SN-2400, Spliced Networks began to use Tyan Transport based barebone systems and eventually transitioned to a software-only company.

In September 2006, John Buswell gave a talk on some of the techniques used by AppOS to provide Zero Day Attack Protection at Ohio Linux Fest in Columbus, Ohio. Spliced Networks continued to dominate in the Appliance Platform arena even though well funded competitors started to enter the market, such as rPath and as virtualization began to gain traction. Early in 2007, John Buswell made a decision to rewrite core elements of AppOS to compete with the growing threat from VMware. In September 2008, Spliced Networks was sold to Digital and Analog Design LLC in Cincinnati.

Environment

John is based out of Athens, Ohio in the United States. He telecommutes from a rural setting. While he maybe in a rural location, he is not short of bandwidth, with DSL, Cable and dedicated T1 service, he has over 20MBps available to him. He uses an AMD Athlon64 X2 Linux workstation with 5 LCD monitors and 2GB of ram. His workstation runs Fedora Core and Gnome. He uses Fedora Core, Ubuntu Server and FreeBSD in the lab. He uses a MacBook Pro and MacBook both running MacOS X 10.5.4. Linux development under MacOS X occurs under Parallels and VMware Fusion when he is away from the lab. He uses a Dell Inspiron laptop running Ubuntu for some open source projects he is working on as well. He uses FireFox 3.x for web browsing.

Personal

John was born in England in 1977, he grew up in Ireland and moved to the United States permanently in 2000. John has a passion for driving sports cars. He can be found driving his distinctive Stormy Blue Mica Mazda RX-8 around Athens, and sometimes even across country. Some of his crazy driving feats include driving over 1500 miles in a Nissan 350Z in a single day. That was from San Jose over the Golden Gate Bridge, up Highway 1, then up 101 through the Redwoods, across US-199 into Oregon and then down I-5 back to San Jose. Having to beat that, he drove from Ohio to California in 2 days in his Mazda RX-8. When he isnt driving, he can be found at a few local car shows with his 1979 Corvette L-82, or working on his 1989 Corvette. Once in awhile, he can be caught playing Gears of War 2 on xbox live. In response to those Microsoft ads, his two young kids use Linux! He has a crazy obsession with drive-thru Safari parks, so if you know a good one, let him know!

People who are to blame for his experience