Paul Vixie is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

whose technical contributions include

Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information ...

(DNS) protocol design and procedure, mechanisms to achieve operational robustness of DNS implementations, and significant contributions to open source software principles and methodology. He also created and launched the first successful commercial anti-spam service. He authored the standard

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

system programs ''SENDS'', ''proxynet'', ''rtty'' and Vixie cron. At one point he ran his own consulting business, Vixie Enterprises. In 2002, Vixie held the record for "most CERT advisories due to a single author".

Early life

Paul A Vixie was born on 23 May 1963 and grew up in San Francisco, and his mother's maiden name is Killian. "There were no computers at my

school A school is the educational institution (and, in the case of in-person learning, the Educational architecture, building) designed to provide learning environments for the teaching of students, usually under the direction of teachers. Most co ...

. I used to cut school and go to City College of San Francisco, where they had a Honeywell system" — Paul Vixie In 1980, when George Washington High School in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

told him he'd have to repeat 11th grade, he quit school and got a job as a programmer at a consulting firm.

Career

Vixie worked on BIND as a software engineer at

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) from 1988 to 1993. After he left DEC in 1994, he founded Internet Software Consortium (ISC) in 1996 together with Rick Adams and Carl Malamud to support BIND and other software for the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

. The activities of ISC were assumed by a new company, Internet Systems Consortium in 2004. Although ISC operates the F

root name server A root name server is a name server for the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. It directly answers requests for records in the root zone and answers other requests by returning a list of the authoritative name servers for ...

, Vixie at one point joined the Open Root Server Network (ORSN) project and operated their L root server. In 1995 he cofounded the

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

Internet Exchange ( PAIX) and, after Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN) bought it in 1999, served as the chief technology officer to MFN /

AboveNet AboveNet was a provider of high Bandwidth (computing), bandwidth telecommunication circuits primarily for large corporate enterprises and communications carriers in 17 markets in the United States and 4 markets in Europe. Its private optical networ ...

and later as the president of PAIX.Executive Profile: Paul Vixie
, Bloomberg (accessed 25 March 2017). In 1998 he cofounded Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), a

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

non-profit company with the goal of stopping email abuse. Vixie is the author of several

Request for Comments A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or ...

(RFC)s, including a Best Current Practice document on "Classless IN-ADDR.ARPA Delegation" (BCP 20), and some

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

software. He stated in 2002 that he "now hold the record for 'most CERT advisories due to a single author.'" In 2008, Vixie served as a judge for the Mozilla Foundation's "Download Day", an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for most downloads in a single day for a new piece of software. Vixie served on the board of trustees of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) from 2005 to 2013, and served as chairman in 2009 and 2010. Vixie also serves on the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of

ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several dat ...

. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Keio University in 2011. In 2013, after nearly 20 years at ISC, he founded a new company, Farsight Security, Inc. spinning off the Security Business Unit from ISC. In 2014, Vixie was inducted into the

Internet Hall of Fame The Internet Hall of Fame is an honorary lifetime achievement award administered by the Internet Society (ISOC) in recognition of individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the Internet. Overview ...

as an Innovator. In 2021, Vixie's company FarSight Security was acquired by DomainTools. Since 2022, he has been working at AWS.

Realizations

BIND BIND () is a suite of software for interacting with the Domain Name System (DNS). Its most prominent component, named (pronounced ''name-dee'': , short for ''name Daemon (computing), daemon''), performs both of the main DNS server roles, acting ...

*Vixie

cron The cron command-line utility is a job scheduler on Unix-like operating systems. Users who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts), also known as cron jobs, to run periodically at fixed t ...

* DHCP * sendmail

Works

* Paul Vixie.
Software Engineering
' an essay in: '' Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'' *

Patents

References

External links

Paul Vixie's CircleID Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Vixie, Paul 1963 births Living people Writers from San Francisco American computer scientists Free software programmers American technology writers Computer science writers Digital Equipment Corporation people Unix people American technology chief executives American chief technology officers Open source advocates