Paul Vixie

Paul Vixie is an American computer scientist. He wrote the widely used Vixie cron in 1987 and from 1988 took over maintenance of BIND, the Berkeley Internet Name Domain server, which became the dominant DNS implementation. He founded the Internet Software Consortium (now Internet Systems Consortium) in 1994 to steward BIND and other infrastructure software, and later operated the F root server.

Fighting abuse

In 1997 Vixie co-founded the Mail Abuse Prevention System and its Realtime Blackhole List, the first DNS-based blocklist for spam sources, a model adopted across the anti-spam industry. He later co-founded Farsight Security, focused on passive DNS data.

Recognition

Vixie was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014 and has authored numerous RFCs on DNS operations and security.

Timeline

• 1963Born in San Francisco, California.
• 1988Takes over maintenance of BIND.
• 1994Founds the Internet Software Consortium (ISC).
• 1997Co-founds MAPS and launches the Realtime Blackhole List.
• 2014Inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.