For this edition of the Developer’s Corner, we checked in with Garrett Cooper, one of our in-house FreeNAS developers. At iXsystems, Garrett provides tech support for FreeNAS and TrueNAS and works on the build system, installer, and sustaining release engineering. He is also an active contributor to the FreeBSD project.
Garrett graduated from the University of Washington in 2007 with a BSEE and a focus on embedded operating systems. It was at college that he first got interested in open source software, courtesy of his roommate. After spending hours fixing virus-infected computers for friends, open source was an appealing option because it’s secure as well as lightweight and highly-customizable. Garrett switched between a variety of operating systems before trying FreeBSD 7.x and has stuck with it ever since.
Following an internship at Intel in the SimAcc Infrastructure team, Garrett worked at Cisco with the Nova group and later in Cisco STBU/IronPort before coming to iXsystems. Garrett describes his role at iXsystems as a triage engineer. “When a customer reports an issue, I try and either put out the fire or redirect traffic,” he explains. “I do the same with community members”. He prioritizes tasks based on their relevance to iXsystems and the FreeNAS community in order to determine his day-to-day activities. As expected of a developer, he describes part of his work process as trying to “automate things in as simple a manner as possible to improve my throughput”.
In between putting out fires, Garrett worked on the newly released FreeNAS 8.0.4. This version of FreeNAS adds in several robustness fixes to reduce the potential for filesystem corruption on root/boot device and improves performance when retrieving data from the root device. Samba was also updated to 3.6.3 to resolve functional and security bugs.
