C O M P U T E R R E S E A R C H
Another of my interests is network and operating system design and research. I'm hoping to build up a few links on this page relating to that.
The most popular open-source project I've personally written large chunks of is poprelay, which is an addition to Sendmail that lets you open up relaying for a short time for users who have authenticated themselves to you via a successful POP3 or IMAP connection.
The operating system I use on my personal machines is NetBSD. I like it because it's BSD based (that's just personal preference-I grew up on BSD), comes with full source code, and runs on many different platforms.
I claim that NetBSD is the most widely ported OS in the world; this claim is often challanged by Linux folks. This page discusses that claim.
My current project with NetBSD is to set up an easy and well-documented cross-compiliation system so that I can use one machine to compile for my i386, Sparc and Sun 3 systems. NetBSD has gone a long way toward this already, since it uses a single source tree for all architectures, and the BSD makefiles are designed to compile for multiple architectures. All I have to do is set up a reasonable toolset system.
I also have some tips and tricks for NetBSD.
For those interested, here's a brief list of the hardware at Cynic Networking Laboratories. It all runs NetBSD; some of it is used for development, and some for production servers. It's in the format machine, RAM, disk, monitor (use). All disks are SCSI unless otherwise noted.
There's also a PII-233 with a couple of gig of disk that serves as the cynic.net web server (among others) and has shell accounts for various people on it. Alan Hodgson is graciously sharing some of the hardware running this machine with me.