Joe Greco Email & Phone Number

Milwaukee, Wi

Bootstrapped and operated a wholesale Usenet outsourcing business for the Usenet and Internet Service Provider (USP/ISP) industries, specializing in placing on-site servers at customer points of presence (similar to Akamai). We provided both high performance local indexing proxies that accessed remote NNTP spools, and also built some of the earliest large scale SATA storage servers for backend spool operations. This is an extension of a service design outlined at SANE 2000.Some of our other specialty services included the development of high performance indexing software, authentication integration, and other Usenet development work.Retail resellers included: ReadNews, Usenet Monster, Megabitz, DigiRock, NNTPAccess, and NNTPServers.ISP (on-site) customers included: CenturyLink, DIAS, Inc.NET, GMT Communications, Level(3), Nationwide Internet, NetConnect Inc., Newnan Utilities, TICON.net, TWTelecom, and XMission.Our technology customers included: Sonic.net, Newshosting, Highwinds, and ReadNews.

One of the earliest users of FreeBSD (and 386BSD before it), advocating for its use in multiple roles throughout the service provider network, including as servers, routers, and other networking appliances.Designed and implemented what is believed to be the first FreeBSD system that booted and ran off a 1.44MB floppy, in order to create diskless Xterminals (XKERNEL). This project was the precursor to PicoBSD, which saw Andrzej Bialecki and others take the framework provided, extending and generalizing it into the first general purpose FreeBSD appliance distribution. This later inspired the creation of NanoBSD, which is still going strong all these years later.

Milwaukee, Wi

Bootstrapped a retail Usenet Service Provider reselling MoreUSENET, LLC's wholesale Usenet services.Authored and maintained an account management and billing system in PHP. Directed business development activities by the other partners, and managed technical support and billing staff members.

Greater Chicago Area

Worked on the development of a cloud control plane, primarily focused on backup operations involving integration with Dell EqualLogic, automated control and management of EqualLogic snapshots, and various ZFS and NFS issues for next-iteration planning.

Winter Park, Fl

Highwinds acquired Newshosting in 2006.Continued work to maintain the Newshosting Diablo clusters, including support for massive overview databases, a numbering extension to allow multiple operation modes to allow clients to pick RFC977 or RFC3977 article numbering, and 64-bit support in the core software. Bug-tracking issues with Linux in networking environments with extremely high numbers of connections.

Santa Rosa, Ca

Designed, built, and deployed on-site a set of custom servers for Sonic.net's Usenet news service, and provided occasional consulting and support services.

Ashburn, Va

Client had previously been reselling services provided by another Usenet outsourcing company, and had developed problems in that business relationship.Helped client develop a business plan to deploy their own servers, acquire financing, lease data center space, and then actually built those servers and deployed them in Ashburn, VA prior to a rebranding of the service as UsenetMonster. Responsible for all technical aspects of maintaining the servers and keeping the service running.

Dayton, Ohio Area

Newshosting began as one of the early outsourcing shops running the Diablo Usenet News package, but quickly ran into a variety of scaling issues as rapid growth occurred.Early on, many changes were made to allow the scaling of Diablo to large numbers of connections, along with a high performance authentication system rewrite to integrate with the customer portal and billing systems.It rapidly became clear that storage performance was an issue. With most service providers based on expensive enterprise-grade storage and large monolithic servers, I proposed a different strategy for Newshosting, and designed and built a prototype high density storage server based on inexpensive SATA drives in a 4U/24 drive chassis in 2004, which allowed for much larger storage systems to be built at a very low cost, This reduction in cost ultimately allowed for the explosion in retention times at Usenet providers now referred to as the "retention wars." Further work was done on an algorithm to allow hash-based distribution and location of data based on the MD5 of a Message-ID, and is now the common algorithm used by Diablo, INN, and Highwinds.

CoreComm acquired Voyager.net in 2000.Developed and deployed services including Usenet news, a large distributed web caching system integrating Squid proxies, a Cidera satellite content delivery downlink, and CacheFlow equipment in a regional network, including centralized caches and ICP location services, and a distributed recursion nameserver architecture. Other responsibilities and projects included out-of-band management systems, managing the server design and build processes, facilities work such as designing data centers, and a variety of other interesting projects.

Voyager acquired ExecPC in 1998.Managed and greatly expanded Usenet news services, and designed virtual news service for integration of several dozen acquired Internet Service Providers. Designed Voyager's downtown Milwaukee POP in the Wells building, working with contractors to determine how to bear the weight loads in a 100-year old building. The building was unable to maintain generators on site, requiring a facility UPS with relatively large battery capacity, and both the equipment racks and UPS needed to have special reinforcing beams welded to the building's structural steel, and then a system of load distributing steel bars to support the gear.

After the departure of the previous system managers, MSCS was left with a problem: they operated one of the major regional hubs for e-mail, news, UUCP, and Internet connectivity, but lacked the staff to support it. As the operator of one of the other major regional hubs, I stepped in and helped them out, including an upgrade of a key system from a SPARCstation 1 on SunOS to a SPARCstation 10 under Solaris, a complete overhaul and ongoing management of the campus Usenet news system, e-mail system enhancements, and many other projects.

Designed, implemented, and maintained a Usenet news server cluster for ExecPC, prior to its acquisition by Voyager.

UNIX operating system specialist for an engineering group working on a next generation medical monitoring device.Developed a socket and syscall shim layer for a port of the X Window System server running on an SBus graphics card with its own onboard processor, to allow it to communicate with the host system.Developed a touchscreen driver for an Elo Touch touchscreen panel for the X11 server, allowing both mouse and touchscreen input.Redesigned and repackaged Solaris. As a desktop/server OS, Solaris would by default take about three minutes merely to get from power-on to a text-based login prompt, due to the many abstractions and generalizations in the system design. For an operating room medical appliance, this was unworkable. The goal was to have the appliance functional within a minute after power-on, which included launch of X11 and the application, and this had to happen even if the restart was due to panic or unexpected power-off, which meant no fsck delays. Created an appliance version of Solaris, including dual read-only OS partitions for upgrade/rollback/assured boot, custom init that internalized most of the system configuration and critical path to application launch, and strategies for the application and data to be housed primarily on read-only or read-mostly partitions.

Shift duties included managing grocery department and front end operations, department staff, customer relations, vendor deliveries, reconciling vendor accounting, facility maintenance, and pretty much jack of all trades. As a small, older store that found itself slowly surrounded by competitors over the years, the pressure to minimize costs (largely by reducing staff) was intense, creating a challenging working environment where the ability to handle many competing tasks rapidly was key; it would not be unusual to be stocking milk, get interrupted for a phone call, have the front end get busy, temporarily assist by opening a checkout line, run out and bring in some grocery carts, answer a customer's inquiry about an item, and then need to assist someone in bakery before finishing the milk - all in less than 15 minutes.