Dr Brian Denehy. 2007-07-01
I first met Brian in the early 90's. I had very recently started working for Defence Security Branch (DSB). He was in charge of the IT Centre at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) here in Canberra.
He and his team had designed and built one of the earliest proxying firewalls that would be used by the Department of Defence to protect their networks. Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) had also built something similar, but that was in South Australia.
My then boss, Col Hale, and myself did a site visit over the hill at Russell to check it all out and so on.
I can still picture Brian's office as it then was, 15+ years later. Every possible horizontal surface had a stack of paper about 20-30 cm high. A filling method I've managed to emulate despite my best efforts otherwise. Saved only by not needing to print out as much.
It wasn't long after that visit that I "acquired" additional responsibilities within DSB. Namely looking after the SunOS and shortly Solaris workstations used by the Security Intelligence cell. I was a VMS sysadmin at the time. I'd used Unix systems while at Uni, but never from a sysadmin perspective. Hence the beginning of over a decade of mentoring by Brian to myself.
"Where's sys$log!?!?!? There's no sys$log on this (*&%^(*&^%(&^%ing system!!!!!"
I'd like to believe that I didn't pester Brian too much in those early years. Certainly he never hesitated to help me in finding answers. He would generally teach you enough to get past the immediate crisis, but also leave bits for yourself to find and learn. I can honestly state that it was principally via Brian that I developed my love of mentoring others.
I lost touch with Brian in the latter part of the 90's, only to renew our friendship in 2000. He was one of the founders, I suppose, of an IT Security startup then called SecureGate. Providing secure gateway (ie. firewall) services to the Federal Government.
I was somewhat inclined to accept their job offer already, but meeting Brian during one of my interviews with them clinched it for me. Just knowing he was already at the company gave it a level of ... rightness for me.
I managed to just miss the impact and fallout of the Melissa virus, only to be thrust into Brian's role as resident guru while he went to the USA for several months. Jeff H knew just as much as me - probably more. But I had a security clearance, and Jeff didn't at that point in time. Sucks to be me. Stuck in the dungeon of the SGE.
It was around this time that Brian also introduced me to the mail server software postfix. Mainly as sendmail (then) didn't cope too well with the impact of Melissa and clients unplugging for several days. That eventually led to a wholesale mass replace of sendmail for postfix across the entire SGE. It seems incredible looking back on it now, how much trust he would happily place in the hands of his protégé's. But then... he taught us how to do things *right*. Many of the little tricks of being a *good* sysadmin. eg. Don't do major updates on a Friday. Unless you enjoy working all weekend. :-)
Eventually SecureGate had a name change to 90East and we picked up more people into the R&D team that we were. What I found incredible is the diverse backgrounds of these people that Brian hired. I was one of the few IT folk in an IT R&D group! One had a Doctorate in Pure Mathematics (Hi Tim!). Another, like Brian himself, Astrophysics (Hi Dave!). Doctorate in Engineering (Hi Amar!) and so on. But it worked! We all had our strengths and weaknesses and truly worked as a team.
Now I found myself in the odd position of having to mentor Brian. He's forgotten more about Unix then I'll ever know, but he'd managed to avoid having to much to do with Windows. No such luck for myself. Sucks to be me x 2.
He was a great boss: "Here's the gist of what I need you to do. Go for it."
No micromanagement. And no problems if you get distracted doing fun stuff either. Amusingly the fun stuff would typically get pulled in later anyway. I suspect he knew it always would.
I left 90East and soon after wound up at Health where I still am. But at least 2-3 times a year, Brian, Jeff and myself would get together over a *very* long lunch. Usually these lunches would be prefaced by a gravelly voice phoning me reminding me that it was past time for another lunch to be organised. :-)
We had organised another lunching for the end of May. He rang me that day to cancel "being more horizontal than vertical". No mention that things were bad. Just that he was not well.
That email conversation between the three of us, I feel, goes a long way to explaining the sort of person Brian was. I reproduce the relevant parts below:
From: Steve McInerney
Sent: 30/05/2007 02:29 PM
To: Jeff Howard
Cc: Brian Denehy
Subject: Re: Lunch!
Dr B has had to cancel. Being more horizontal than vertical.
So pending till we hear he's vertical again.
- S
-------
From: Jeff Howard
Date: Wed, May 30, 2007 4:22 pm
To: Steve McInerney
Cc: Brian Denehy
Subject: Re: Lunch!
Did he fall over laughing about the great telnet debate in SAGE-AU?? :-)
---
Cheers, Jeff
-------
From: Steve McInerney
Sent: Thursday, 31 May 2007 8:05 AM
To: Jeff Howard
Cc: Brian Denehy
Subject: Re: Lunch!
Probably....
He said it was some funky problem, but we know the truth.
- S
-------
From: Brian Denehy
Sent: Thu, May 31, 2007 1:43 pm
To: Steve McInerney
Cc: Jeff Howard
Subject: Re: Lunch!
A fowl canard, but perhaps it's just as well I missed out on the great
telnet debate, which sounds like it could induce apoplexy.
Entered from flat on my back, with assistance from 802.11 and VPN.
A not so brief explain from myself to Brian about the "Great Telnet Debate" and his reply back to just myself:
From: Brian Denehy
Sent: Thu, May 31, 2007 1:43 pm
To: Steve McInerney
Subject: Re: Lunch!
Tee hee says evil dvb.
As if someone would have time to sniff when there are 10e9 syslog lines
per day to mangle, analyse, put into writeonly storage and so on. (this
year) Traffic is still doubling every ten months. We going to capture
bytes??? Dream on.
Incidentally, as a man who like to get an idea of the big picture, you
should look at at the SyLK tools for processing flows. You can find out
all sorts of interesting things during and after the fact, like the folk
who suddenly were "having a slow network" and the problem solver traced
it to the WoW server someone had set up on a "decommissioned" machine...
-----Original Message-----
No names mentioned, but things like, well yes CT are a threat but if we
can't trust them to not sniff, we're screwed anyway.
Grin. "evil dvb". Brian's evil twin. Ever see the Simpson's Episode with Good Homer and Evil Homer? Same same.
Good Brian: bvd. Evil Brian: dvb.
So here we have Brian. Probably in huge amounts of pain. Flat on his back. Possibly unbeknownst to him, less than a month left to live and he *still* sends me emails mentoring me. Exposing me to new and cool tools to help do a better job for my clients.
My last ever communication from Brian was on the 7th of June. A one line email with a link to SyLK.
A true mentor to the very last.
Dr B, as he was affectionately known by what seems like an entire generation of firewall sysadmins, died on the 1st of July 2007 from cancer.
I've long felt that the least I could do to repay his generosity to myself was treat and mentor others as he mentored me. Now? Now it seems even more appropriate.
So, Cheers Dr B. Forever free of BSoD's.
- Steve
2007-07-10
