Bill Fenner
Member Of Technical Staff at Arista Networks
Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBill Fenner is a seasoned networking expert and Member of Technical Staff at Arista Networks with nearly three decades of experience in protocol design, implementation, and network diagnostics. He has deep roots in the IETF—former Routing Area Director, co-chair of idmr and magma working groups, liaison to IANA and the RFC Editor—and is author or co-author of numerous influential RFCs including IGMPv3 and PIM-SM. His career spans research roles at AT&T Labs and Xerox PARC, long-standing FreeBSD committer work, and open-source contributions to tools like SmokePing and the FreeBSD doc tree, showing a sustained focus on operational observability. Obsessed with uncovering the "invisible" faults tcpdump first revealed to him, Bill specializes in proactive monitoring and diagnostics that detect problems users don’t notice. Notably, he co-authored the 2003 update to Richard Stevens' UNIX Network Programming, underscoring his blend of system-level craftsmanship and protocol theory.
29 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Penn State University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (13)
html10
web-development10
network-monitoring10
perl10
cgi10
freebsd9
openssh9
css9
snmpd9
snmp9
error-handling8
bash7
git5
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
freebsd/freebsd-doc
Oct 1996 - Oct 2007
FreeBSD doc tree (read-only mirror)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:94 commits in 11 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Bill primarily focused on modifying the FreeBSD documentation's CGI scripts. Their work involved updating the website's look and feel, specifically the CGI-style, by modifying the HTML header and footer. They made conditional changes to the base URL path ($hsty_base) based on the server environment to ensure correct resource linking for both CGI and mirror setups. The commits also included a CSS workaround and its subsequent disabling, addressing HTML4 compatibility issues.
freebsdread-onlynetbsd
oetiker/SmokePing
Feb 2013 - Apr 2015
The Active Monitoring System
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 1 comment in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Bill primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and reliability of the monitoring system's backend. Their contributions involved refactoring code to improve clarity and maintainability, such as replacing variables for better scoping. They also addressed error handling by improving SNMP error logging and introducing a new probe for Arista EOS devices. Furthermore, the user added a new probe to use the EOS "ping" cli command, demonstrating expertise in network monitoring and configuration.
snmpmonitormonitoringsystem-monitoring
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