| Greg 'Groggy' Lehey |
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G'day! I'm Greg Lehey, a retired Unix kernel hacker.
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I was born in Australia and went to school in Malaysia, Australia and England. After that, I studied Chemistry at the University of Hamburg in Germany and Chemical Engineering at the University of Exeter in England, but I never practiced these disciplines: on leaving University, I went into computing immediately.
I spent nearly all my professional career in Germany, where I worked for computer manufacturers such as Univac, Tandem, and Siemens-Nixdorf, the German Government organization for space research, at the time called DFVLR (Deutsche Forschungs- und Versuchsanstalt für Luft- und Raumfahrt), which they have mercifully since truncated to DLR, nameless software houses and a large user before deciding to work for myself. In early 1997 I returned to Australia, and in July 2007 I retired.
In the course of my 34 years in the industry I performed many jobs, ranging from kernel development to product marketing, systems programming to systems administration, processing satellite data to programming petrol (US: gasoline) pumps. About the only thing I haven't done much is writing commercial applications software.
I retired from active work on 1 July 2007. Prior to that I had a number of professional activities, many of which I intend to maintain.
In previous times I have been:
There's more information in my resumé, which may be slightly out of date.
Among my publications are Porting UNIX Software, published by O'Reilly and Associates and Installing and Running FreeBSD and its successor The Complete FreeBSD, both originally published by Walnut Creek CDROM. The fourth edition of The Complete FreeBSD was published by O'Reilly and Associates.
In agreement with O'Reilly, I released Porting UNIX Software under the Creative Commons license in October 2004, and on 24 February 2006, the 10th anniversary of the first edition, I also released The Complete FreeBSD.
When I can drag myself away from my collection of past and present UNIX machines, I'm involved in performing baroque and classical woodwind music on my collection of original and period instruments, exploring the Australian countryside with my family on our Arab and Peruvian horses, gardening, exploring new cookery or photographic techniques or ancient and obscure European languages. Previously I was also an active brewer.
In addition, I'm interested in computer history, and of course conventional wisdom demands that a hacker have cats.
Well, how much money do you have?
That's not as silly or humourous a question as it may seem. Read on. If you have the money, I have two rates, which depend on the duration of the work. In either case, I need a written agreement. Note that I am now retired, so the interest factor is of great importance to my decision to take up any new contract.
For normal professional work, my rate is US$ 180 per hour or part thereof, plus expenses. Lower rates may apply for long-term work.
If you're a bona fide private person or educational institution needing a little help, I could make it significantly cheaper. If you're not sure, give me a call, and we can discuss the matter. If the question's quick, and if you have done your homework, you might even get your answer for free.
In addition to the above, I may also agree to lower rates if the project interests me greatly. Again, it doesn't cost anything to ask.
If you wish me to perform paid work for you, I will need an agreement in writing or mail signed with a trusted key stating that you wish me to perform work for you, and that you are aware of the pricing. See below for how to get the letter to me.
Note that I no longer answer private questions about FreeBSD for free. These questions are normally of general interest, so you should send them to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list. By sending your question to FreeBSD-questions, you allow others to share in the reply to your question.
| By mail: | grog@lemis.com |
| By phone: | +61-3-5346-1370 |
| Mobile phone: |
+61-490-494-038. Since getting the second radiation tower in Dereel, we
now have coverage, and the phone is usually turned on. But I don't carry it with me,
and I won't hear if it rings. Use only if I tell you that it will be answered.
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| Fax: |
I no longer use faxes. If you have to send me one, contact me and we'll work something
out.
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| By snail: | Greg Lehey
29 Stones Road Dereel VIC 3352 Australia |
Since my retirement, most of my mail is from mailing lists. I delete most of them without reading them, based on the subject line, and more if I find them illegible once I look inside. I do make exceptions for messages addressed to me personally, so if you want to contact me, please be sure to include my name on the To: line. I'd still prefer that you send me mail which is legible and has a recognizable Subject: line. See my email page for some ideas on what kind of mail drives me up the wall.
As a measure against spam, my mail servers reject mail from servers which do not have reverse DNS lookup, or which claim to be a different name from the values returned by the reverse lookup. A number of wannabee ISPs have recently determined that they don't need reverse DNS, because they don't understand it. If your ISP is one of these, you will not be able to send me mail.
In the course of the years, I used to have a number of mail IDs. The search engines in the Web have been very good about retaining them for posterity, but many of them no longer work. In particular, I gave up my last domain, lemis.de, years ago. It has now been taken over by a different company. Mail to this address will bounce.
I also have mail addresses at FreeBSD.org, NetBSD.org, ozlabs.org and auug.org.au. Due to the increase in spam, I no longer publish them. They are for my convenience only. Mail to these addresses is automatically forwarded to grog@lemis.com. Don't use the other addresses unless you have a good reason. In particular, don't use the address honigtopf@lemis.com, which is only here to help catch spammers scanning this page. If you send mail to that address, your site will automatically be blocked. See problems sending mail to LEMIS for more details.
You'll note that my mail ID is grog@lemis.com, not greg@lemis.com, and I have acquired the nickname 'Groggy'. There's a story behind that name.
How do you know it's me? How do I know you're you? That's one of the big questions surrounding internet communication, of course. One solution is PGP, Phil Zimmermann's Pretty Good Privacy. See the PGP Home Page for more information on PGP. If you want to send me encrypted mail, you can encrypt it with the following PGP public key.
Please don't use the keys I supplied the previous versions of this web page. I no longer have the private keys, so I can't decode messages which are encoded with them.
The correct way to find my public key is to get it from the PGP key server. It's also here, but you'll have to check it.
| Greg's home page | Greg's diary | Greg's photos | Copyright |
