On 6/19/25 6:06 AM, Dobbins, Roland via NANOG wrote:
On Jun 19, 2025, at 19:55, Suresh Ramasubramanian via NANOG
<[email protected]> wrote:
End of an era
Fred was a friend, mentor, and pillar of the IETF and the operational
community. His contributions to the industry are manifold, and he always took
the time to work with and inspire others at all levels of participation.
I’m grateful to’ve known and worked with him; he left the world a better place
as a direct result of his efforts, which is rare, indeed.
He will be missed.
Well, crap. This is horrible news to wake up to. Fred in many ways
embodied what I thought the IETF was. He was chair at the time I came
around in 1998 to Cisco so of course I had quite a bit of reverence for
him. I still remember asking him about BGP routing and what prevented
bad people from doing bad things with routes . I was having a crash
course in security stuff for our VoIP work, so I started to see the rest
of the world through that prism too. Not that I had anything to do with
RPKI, but I may have been one of the first to bring that sort of concern
to Fred's attention and that has lasted with me to this day. I could
really piss Fred off too, so I was always surprised that he didn't seem
to internalize it with me (I could be an asshole, that's for sure). We
worked on a bunch of things off and on informally over the years, and
Fred was even part of Cisco's initial cabal and foray into email/spam
that would ultimately become DKIM which I doubt many people know. But
that's sort of how he struck me: that he wasn't a glory-seeker and most
especially was approachable by cocky asshole engineers like me.
What terrible, terrible news. RIP, Fred.
Mike
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