I bought my first copy of Sys Admin back in November of 1994, their annual security issue. I was just taking on a student sys admin job in our computer science lab at Tulane. Back then in those days, there weren't quite so many sources to learn UNIX security tricks from. I devoured each article in that first issue, and subsequently picked up the newest copy every couple of months from the campus bookstore.
A couple of years later while still in school, I built up the confidence to submit my first security article to Sys Amin. At the time, our university web master had moved on to another position, and they asked me to fill her shoes temporarily until they hired a replacement. Obviously, I didn't want our web server hacked on my guard, so did everything I could to fortify the scripting environment. My eventual submission entitled, "Creating a Secure CGI Environment", was accepted and included in the 1996 Security issue. As anyone who has ever published anything will tell you, there's nothing quite like the thrill seeing your name in print for the very first time.
Over the next few years as my security career was just taking off, I continued to read and contribute to Sys Admin. In the July and August issues in 1997, I wrote a two part series on PGP with a general treatment of email privacy.
In their annual security issue of 1998, I incorporated some of the work I had done in college detecting buffer overflows on our Sun Sparc machines in an article entitled "Detecting Illegal Root Transitions in Solaris."
The last article I wrote was in January of 2000. It was entitled "Creating and Deploying a Honey Pot" and was based on research I had done while at MIT Lincoln Laboratory the same time as the DARPA IDS project was underway.
Thanks to former editor Amber Ankerholz for her patience and help over the years refining my technical writing skills. Best of wishes to the entire Sys Admin staff in their next endeavors.
