Sam Varghese
Friday, 24 October 2008 05:14
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 6
If you're running GNU/Linux and communicating remotely with other computers, there's a very good chance you have reason to thank Damien Miller.
The soft-spoken developer, now in his mid-30s, has been handling the portable OpenSSH project for some years now; mapping of SSH versions on the internet show that something like
81.25 percent of the SSH servers are running OpenSSH.
OpenSSH is run by the OpenBSD project which is headed by Theo de Raadt. SSH or Secure Shell is a program used to log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another. It provides strong authentication and secure communications over insecure channels. OpenSSH is a free implementation of the program.
Miller, a Melbourne lad, joined the project in 1999, a month or so after it had kicked off. At the time, he was working for a Melbourne company, called Internet Business Solutions (IBS). "One of the main products which I worked on was a managed firewall service, basically deploying Linux boxes at customers' sites. There was software which enabled us or the customer to handle things like mail, firewall and, in some cases, web caching as well. They had a couple of hundred of these boxes around the country and I worked on the operating system side of things for them, effectively building a Linux distribution and writing the management software. The software helped them run it and let the network operations people administer it remotely as well. That's the place where my involvement with OpenSSH started."
There was a version of SSH available at the time, put out by a Finnish developer named Tatu Ylonen, but the licensing terms were rather restrictive. "It was initially a kind of permissive licence which said that you could do what you liked with it but if you changed the protocol you were not allowed to call it SSH anymore," Miller says.
"Then slowly others (restrictions) were added, like you can't sell it, you can't use it for any commercial use, you can only use it for academic or personal use. We were a small company and we couldn't afford a couple of hundred bucks worth of software to plonk on each of these machines. So I wrote a fairly horrible equivalent using the SSL protocol which kept us going until I heard of the OpenBSD project's work on creating OpenSSH. I had used OpenBSD once or twice back then; it didn't fulfill the need I had so I kept using Linux. But I took a bit more notice of OpenBSD once I heard of OpenSSH because this was something which useful to our company."
For Miller to dip his toes in these waters is rather far from his roots - he is a self-taught developer, one who, like many others, had an interest in computers in his young days but then turned to other interests until some years had passed.
"My parents got me my first computer when I was about eight," he says. "Back in those days, owning a computer was very conducive to learning how to program because they didn't do much unless you programmed them to do something or bought some software which wasn't particularly widely available in Australia.
"I learnt to program fairly young and I didn't really pursue it much after that. I learnt and then forgot about it and then picked it up again in my mid-20s when I was in arts school, studying film sound in RMIT. There I learnt that you could use computers to write music, so I dusted off what I knew and started doing that for a while.
"At the same time, this internet thing was gathering steam and you could use computers to publish information online. So I set up a web server and found myself helping a friend to publish a site. I didn't have any formal training, I kind of picked it up as I went along."
