I got interested in electronics from a very young age. When I was 14, I was wire-wrapping little GC Electronics kits together and eventually learned to etch circuit boards from electronics schematics. In the early 80s before the IBM PC came out, I began to get involved in current computers like the Commodore VIC 20. My interest then moved away from the computers themselves and into networking them together, first by ASCII text over modems in the BBS scene and eventually by PPP and TCP/IP. Ultimately I got into Ethernet networking in a professional capacity, and I've since worked in many different aspects of the computer industry. I've done everything from desktop support to writing training curricula to flying an ISP. My wife likes to say that I'm not happy unless I'm elbow-deep in computer guts, and she has a point. It's this fascination with computers and how they work together to enhance our lives that has led to pushing the envelope of the commercial DOS and Windows operating systems. When these possibilities eventually petered out, I was led into working with UNIX. I've been mixing UNIX into my production networks since then.

I have used FreeBSD as a server software platform, right alongside Windows NT servers, in all of the corporate networks that I managed. FreeBSD has performed extremely well for routing, mail, webserving, fileserving, and other general-purpose corporate serving tasks. The incredible thing about it is that it has been rock solid and stable ever since version 1.1. Unlike most commercial operating systems there is none of this "upgrading to the next OS version to fix a bug" business. I have been very impressed by FreeBSD's efficiency on server hardware that is now considered too old and slow for Windows 2000, such as Pentium 200Mhz, 64MB ram systems. Today as I replace Windows NT 4 servers with new hardware running Windows 2K, I regularly cycle the obsolete NT4 hardware into FreeBSD servers that frequently outperform their Windows 2000 sisters in speed and reliability.

I set out to write the Networker's Guide as a book, although I initially never expected to publish it commercially. It was to be used as a guide for assistant administrators in the organizations that I worked in, to teach them to administer FreeBSD servers that I had set up. As the book progressed, FreeBSD also continued to gain market share, and it became evident that many organizational network administrators were searching for a guide that would allow them to quickly come up to speed with FreeBSD. I approached Addison-Wesley with the idea of publishing it and they were interested. The result is a book that bridges the gap between introductory UNIX texts, such as those frequently found in Intro to UNIX classes at the local college level, and the extremely advanced texts such as The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, edited by Marshall Kirk McKusick, that are intended for programmers. Rather than approaching the subject from a general UNIX or Linux viewpoint, I focused on FreeBSD to permit specific examples and instruction.

I hope that the book becomes your most-used reference text in your FreeBSD library, and I look forward to your comments and feedback.

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