Next up on our list of developers, I had the opportunity to chat with our Senior Software Engineer, FreeNAS developer, and all-around BSD Geek, John Hixson.
John has worked on identity management software that tied into multiple systems (such as an ERP system, Active Directory and ADAM servers, LDAP servers, Google apps, NetApp, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and etc). He also maintained all of the FreeBSD servers at the University of the Pacific, which consisted of handling email, spam filtering, home directories, DNS, and DHCP, among others.
He also worked for an ISP, building/racking/maintaining servers, provisioning/deprovisioning accounts, websites, email, etc. During his time there, John learned a lot about in-depth Unix (whether he wanted to or not!) In addition, John was involved with a number of startups for ad-hoc programming. This included various dynamic database driven websites prior to the fancier web frameworks that now exist for making it “easy”. He encountered a lot of database programming and website template type programming during this time. Throughout his career, John has always had a role not only as a developer, but also as a system administrator, and consequently has insightful knowledge of the entire software and hardware stack.
John got into open source very early on. He is very interested in programming for fun and came across Linux as he browsed through the Internet. His account of the experience: “I installed it and fell in love immediately. I locked myself up in my room and forced myself to learn VI and GCC. Around the same time, people on IRC referred me to BSD. I installed it and fell even more in love than I had been previously with Linux.”
He was very impressed with several factors. It was much easier to recompile a kernel, to install packages (ports), and everything was rock solid. For many years and to this day, John has had various BSD’s and Linux’s installed on a plethora of computers in his home office. On any given day at iXsystems, John generally works on the FreeNAS storage operating system. In the past, he has worked on the installer, CLI configuration, LDAP and Active Directory, and various other bits and pieces. He currently specializes in the plug-ins system, which has been in large demand within the community. He says it is complicated to integrate because many different pieces have to function correctly in order for the entire feature to work. Plug-ins allow FreeNAS to become a print server, a multimedia server, and basically anything the user would like it to be, with only imagination as the limit. They are based on PBI’s (Push-Button Installer) binaries from the PC-BSD project, and allow the immediate use of all PC-BSD packages on FreeNAS.
Regarding the future of FreeNAS, John mentions he would like to see it become bigger and take over markets. He thinks it is quite possible for the FreeNAS team to bring the product up another level, with the same quality of support, training, clustering, and tools to migrate data as the “big name” companies.
In a closing comment, John reminds us all: “Don’t forget: Beer is an essential part of every programmer’s diet. Without it, who knows what kind of buggy software we would produce!”
I would like to thank John Hixson for taking the time to talk and enlighten us. We’ll be taking a break from Developer’s Corner, but we’ll definitely have more in the future.
Lisa Liang
Marketing Assistant
