Tom Eastep


Born 1945 in Washington State.

BA Mathematics from Washington State University 1967

MA Mathematics from University of Washington 1969

Burroughs Corporation (now Unisys) 1969 - 1980

Tandem Computers, Incorporated (now part of Compaq Computer Corporation) 1980 - present

Married 1969 - no children.


In professional life, my current area of specialization is Open File Systems where I am a software designer. I became interested in Internet Security when I established a home office in 1999 and installed a DSL circuit. I investigated ipchains and developed the scripts which are now collectively known as Seattle Firewall. I telecommute from Shoreline, Washington where I live with my wife Tarry.

Our current home network consists of:

  • 1.2Gz Athlon, RH7.1 with 2.4.9 kernel, 320MB RAM, 40GB & 20GB IDE HDs and RTL8139 10/100 NIC - My personal system.
  • K6-2/350, RH7.1 with 2.4.9 kernel, 128MB RAM, 8GB IDE HD, EEPRO-100 NIC  - Mail, HTTP, FTP, DNS server.
  • PII/233, RH7.1 with 2.4.9 kernel, 128MB MB RAM, 2GB SCSI HD - 3 LNE100TX  (tulip) NICs  - Firewall running Shorewall 1.1.12, Samba WINS and DHCP servers.  Also runs pptp-linux-1.0.3-1 to implement a tunnel to my employer, and runs PoPToP for road warrior access. Acts as a transparent HTTP proxy using Squid.
  • Duron 750, Win ME, 192MB RAM, 20GB HD, HP NIC - My wife's personal system.
  • PII/400 Laptop, Win2k SP2, 224MB RAM, 12GB HD, onboard EEPRO100 and EEPRO100 in expansion base - My main work system.
  • I also have a couple of old 486 systems that I use for firewall testing.

All of our systems are made by Compaq.


Last updated 8/28/2001 - Tom Eastep