About Andrew McRae

Patents

These patents have been granted:

PNG Trip

In September 2006 I took a trip to Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea, to do some volunteer work (Linux training). I wrote a blog of the trip, along with some photos.

Some Background

In September 2006 I joined Google Inc. Previously, for 3 years I was a Senior Principal Engineer in a Silicon Valley startup called NetDevices Inc., working on a new branch office router.

Prior to October 2003, I was at Cisco Systems, where I had been a Distinguished Engineer in the Routing Technology Group, working on next generation router architectures.

I joined cisco in October 1995 as part of the ELC group in Core Engineering. I have worked on a number of port adaptors, mostly serial and channelised. I spent 18 months on the AS5800 product, as a technical leader. I was the lead engineer on the NSE-1 , the next generation processing engine for the C7200 series. I also was the designer and implementor of TurboACL, a new patented high speed packet classification algorithm.

Before cisco, I was a Principal Engineer at Mits Ltd. (Australia), where for 11 years I worked on real time supervisory and control systems. My responsibilities included communications and embedded systems, and a range of other areas such as Unix applications and drivers. In the dim past I co-founded a company specialising in motion control special effects and computer graphics for film and television.

In extra-curricular activities, I was the developer of PC-Card technology for the FreeBSD project, and actively promote the use and development of Open Source Software.

I am also involved in the Australia Unix Users Group (AUUG), where I regularly deliver papers, hang out with the local Unix folks and generally have a good time. I was programme chair of AUUG'98.

I am a founding member and a current director of the Australian Chapter of the Internet Society.

Bibliography

Here is a list of papers that I have published, some of which are online, and others which can be obtained from the author.

• A Status Report on the X11 Windowing System, presented at the Australian Unix Users Group (AUUG) conference, September 1989.
• Unix in the Real Time World, presented at the AUUG Summer conference, Sydney, February 1990.
• A Unix Task Broker, published in the AUUG newsletter March/April 1992.
• Porting TCP/IP to 802.4 Token Bus, presented at the September 1991 national AUUG conference (Sydney).
• Open LANs Span All Boundaries, Article in Computing Australia, September 1991.
• Hardware Profiling Of Kernel Network Code, presented at the AUUG Summer conference, Sydney, April 1992, and also presented at the AUUG national conference September 1992.
• C++ in an Embedded Environment, presented at AUUG national conference September 1992.
• The Architecture of a Distributed Substation Management System, presented at Distribution Automation/Demand Side Management conference, Palm Springs, California, January 1993.
• Hardware Profiling of Kernels, presented at USENIX Winter conference, San Diego, California, January 1993.
• 386BSD: A Look Under The Hood, presented at AUUG Canberra and Sydney summer conferences February 1993.
• Intelligent Substations: Costs and Benefits, presented at Electricity Supply Engineers' Association conference, September 1993.
• A New Communications Paradigm For UNIX, presented at AUUG national conference September 1993.
• Substation Management for Distribution Utilities, presented at Distribution 2000, Melbourne, November 1993.
• IP Firewalls using a Tunnel Driver, presented at CSIRO System Security seminar September 1994.
• Unix: Live Free or Die!, article for Open Systems Review, March 1995; reprinted in AUUGN April 1995.
• Plug and Play Unix, presented at AUUG Canberra summer conference February 1995.
• FreeBSD and PCMCIA, half day seminar for NSW AUUG Summer technical workshops March 1995
• The World Wide Web and Online Documentation, paper for MITS Users Group meeting, June 1995.
• Plug'n'Play Unix, invited talk presented at AUUG national conference September 1995.
• The Internet in the 21st Century, presented at AUUG national conference September 1996.
• Globally Distributed Software Development Challenges, presented at SEA'99 (Software Engineering Australia), Canberra, April 1999.
• High Speed Packet Classification, presented at AUUG national conference September 1999. The slides for this talk are also available.
• Toaster: A High Speed Packet Processing Engine, presented at the AUUG national conference June 2000.
• A User Level Networking Infrastructure for Linux, presented at AUUG National Conference, September 2004.
• Building a Router on Linux, presented at AUUG National Conference, October 2005.
• A Linux Task Manager, presented at AUUG National Conference, October 2006.
• An Open Network Platform, presented at AUUG National Conference, October 2006.