Geoff Collyer
copyright © 1986 Gillian Collyer
From 1994 through 2001,
I was a Member of Technical Staff at
Bell Labs
(originally a part of AT&T, now a part of
Lucent Technologies)
in Murray Hill, NJ,
where I worked on operating systems and
messaging systems and protocols, among other things.
I rejoined Bell Labs Research on 10 July 2006.
pgp public key(s)
My current
RSA public key
was generated by PGP 2.6.2
(i.e. it's in the second of three or four incompatible formats)
and its fingerprint is
Type bits/keyID Date User ID
pub 1024/1F08CB75 1996/06/24 Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>
Geoff Collyer <geoff@world.std.com>
Geoff Collyer <geoff@bell-labs.com>
Key fingerprint = 67 08 1E F6 6B F3 1B 1B CF 27 87 7B 3D 59 30 A1
computing experience
-
maintain the original
Plan 9
file server kernel
(now upgraded to 64-bit sizes)
and contribute to Plan 9 generally.
-
merged the big-endian and little-endian MIPS compilers, assemblers and loaders.
-
wrote the current (new) Plan 9 tar,
which is cleaner and faster than the old one, and is POSIX-compliant
(i.e., can cope with longer path names).
-
modified the
file server kernel to use 64-bit file sizes,
offsets and block numbers internally,
ported the CPU kernel's IDE code, thus enabling the use of DMA, RWM, etc.,
and ported the CPU kernel's Intel gigabit Ethernet driver.
-
added greylisting and other anti-spam measures to
smtpd.
-
added multicasting (for IPv6) and shutdown entry points to drivers
for all modern ethernet cards.
updated the connection server to recognise
icmpv6.
fixed the kernel to recognise v6 addresses starting with ``20'' as global.
-
ported
dbm
and
mdbm
libraries and made them use a consistent byte order on disk,
rendering the databases portable across CPU architectures.
-
arranged completely diskless booting of Plan 9 PCs using compact flash cards
-
added device mirroring (think RAID 1) to the Plan 9 file server kernel.
Combined with support for IDE disks,
this enables use of inexpensive hardware to form
a large Plan 9 file server.
-
set up and ran the largest Plan 9 file server
(with optical disc jukebox)
inside Bell Labs other than the main Plan 9 development file server.
Extended support for jukeboxes with optical disks of varying sizes.
The smaller jukeboxes can now be had second-hand quite cheaply.
-
on the
inferno
distributed operating system,
built a scalable message store that served a broken-out view of MIME
messages, and designed and implemented rsmtp, an SMTP replacement.
Got Inferno running on Mac OS X.
-
configuring IPv6 tunnelling networks
-
developed the operating system for the now-defunct AT&T HomeCenter™
set-top box, notably DSP communication, and the C library.
-
Unix device drivers
(e.g. for
Tektronix storage (display) tubes (for V6 Unix),
Nuclear Medicine scintillation counters (for V6 Unix),
terminal multiplexors,
disks),
bootstraps,
and other kernel work
(e.g. putting /tmp in memory).
-
reverse-engineering (``decompiling'') manual pages from
nroff output to troff -man input:
nam
-
Unix system programming and running Unix systems
(including 8th and 9th edition)
for almost a decade at
the University of Toronto,
notably for
the computing center,
undergraduate computer science instruction,
and
the statistics department.
-
set up the original bell-labs.com servers
during the ATT/Lucent split,
notably DNS and mail servers on Plan 9 and internal and
external
web servers.
publications
-
assigning interrupt priorities in software
via interrupt queueing, in Computing Systems, Spring 1996
-
evolution of operating systems:
Research Unix in
html and
postscript
(updated 23 Dec 1998 to more closely match the printed article
in Microsystems in 1984).
Also, a new, improved draft that fixes a number of errors we missed the
first time around and adds real references, in
html and
postscript.
-
software reimplementation:
the shell,
including
stak.c from the appendix,
and a newer, tidier
stak.c
that eliminates
struct
alignment problems that showed up on the Alpha.
I've retrofitted the above memory-management, directory-reading
and a few other changes into a V7 sh
that should run on POSIXy systems.
It's been run on the BSDs and Linux on x86 PCs without trouble.
Among its other features,
it lacks the GNU
readline
library, so what you type is what you get.
Update!
Mon Mar 7 04:03:13 PST 2005:
To get it running on 64-bit Suns, I had to change two declarations;
v7sh.tar and the newer stak.c have been updated.
-
performance tuning and more software reimplementation:
C news netnews software
-
programming style:
no ifdefs,
can't happen
(postscript)
-
automated game referees:
othello
computing interests
-
Plan 9,
the successor to Unix;
a distributed system
drawing on over 20 years of experience with Unix
-
my own
contributions
of Plan 9 software
-
an early outline of a proposed-but-rejected book about
why Plan 9 matters.
Pardon the formatting; it was converted to HTML mechanically.
-
the
inferno
distributed system,
derived from Plan 9,
and the
limbo
language, which features particularly helpful support
for processes sharing address space.
If POSIX pthreads give you the willies,
limbo might be for you.
inferno runs on bare 386 or Sparc hardware
and as a `guest OS' on the usual (l)Unixes and MS Windows.
-
archiving and optical media, notably CD-R.
Plan 9 has a convenient backup system using optical disks,
discussed in its
overview,
file server
and
port
papers.
The
venti
block store looks promising and I'm running a
venti
store for general experimentation.
Fossil,
the file server built on top of
venti,
shows promise too, but is less mature and needs to be shaken down severely.
-
indexing.
This
is the distribution of my
nov
news overview database code.
Nov
is now incorporated into essentially all serious newsreaders.
-
software reimplementation:
More Taste, Less Greed
-
strong cryptography as an aid to privacy and civil rights
-
Mac OS X's Safari is a pretty good web browser.
If you buy a used Mac, I have
my notes from buying an upgraded Mac and
others' documentation,
including dealing with OpenFirmware.
My trials with adding PCI Ethernet cards are
here.
These days, I'd recommend buying a new Mac if you can afford it,
or one with built-in USB, so you can run Panther, if not.
undocumented things you may need to know
how to configure Vonage's Motorola VT1005V VOIP phone adapter
The thing won't talk to anybody initially.
It's initially configured to be 192.168.102.1
and listen for web connections; that's documented.
What doesn't appear to be documented is that the machine running
the web browser needs to have,
possibly as one of several,
the IP address 192.168.102.99.
I found this in a discussion forum on broadbandreports.com
and it works.
Also, the RJ-45 Ethernet port labelled `PC' is expecting a cross-over
Ethernet cable if you plug it into a switch rather than directly into a
computer.
If you do plug it into a switch, it's a wise precaution to unplug the WAN
port first to avoid the possibility of looping packets.
It's arguably a bug that the box won't respond to pings from anybody else
(nor will vonage.com nor www.vonage.com).
The ``diagnostics'' available when something goes wrong
consists of a single blinking light, the meanings of which
are documented.
What's apparently not documented is that the light lies.
From personal experience,
some operations seem to just time-out and the box moves onto the next step.
It's entirely possible to get the box into its `light on solid' state,
which is supposed to mean that it's ready to go, without it having
made contact with Vonage's servers.
Adding a serial port, through which one could configure the box and
receive error messages, would be a big step forward.
The box is a little too eager to be your router and NAT translator
and serve DHCP.
This is a test, this is only a test:
most difficult
bullet: •
ellipsis: ⋯
smiley: ☺ @ 0x263a
white king: ♔
<=: ≤
letters
c cedilla: ç
cyrillic small letter ia: я
hebrew letter bet: ב
beta: β
latin small letter sharp s: ß
latin small letter thorn: þ
ligatures oe, then ae: œuf Œ æsthetic Æ
scandinavian vowels: å mÖØse
symbols
cjk, ideographs, etc.: 逸 逹 @ 0x9038—0x9039, ぴ @ 0x3074
copyright: ©
half-sign: ½
pounds sterling: £
euro: ₠ @ 0x20a0, € @ 0x20ac
registered: ®
section mark: §
trademark: ™
w cubed: w³ (0xb3) w (0x2073)
Geoff Collyer
geoff at collyer.net