[afnog] Remembering apb (was: In Memoriam: Alan Barrett

[Randy Bush]

Date: Thu, 28 May 2026 08:24:58 -0700
From: Randy Bush <randy at psg.com>
To: Mirjam Kuehne <mir at zu-hause.nl>
CC: ripe-list at ripe.net
Subject: [ripe-list] Re: In memoriam: Alan Barrett

[ because most folk do not know ]

Alan was an early developer and promoter of the network in Southern
Africa.  He was the system administrator at the University of Natal in
Durban when the first IP connections came into South Africa at the end
of the '80s.  He was part of the original triangle for TCP/IP, UND,
University of Cape Town, and the hub, Rhodes university.  I once visited
him in Durban; but to be honest, all I remember is the jacaranda and my
first introduction to KwaZulu culture.

In 1991 RAINet (Portland) had an advertising agency as a customer and
they had a growing rack of Macintoshs serving their customers' web
sites.  Alan hacked NetScape to listen on in_addr(any).  He wrote it up
as a paper for INET '92 in Kobe.  The rest is history.  [ for the non
geeks, this hack is at the core of Apache and other multi-site web
servers ]

Alan, Chris Pinkham[0], and Paul Nash[1] went on to form the first
African commercial ISP, TICSA, which was quite successful.  Then on to
lead Cequrux, a software house which developed an enterprise security
appliance.

From there to AfNOG, AfriNIC, and the stories most folk know.

He was a gentle soul.  We miss you, Alan.

---

[0] Who went on to develop EC2, the first cloud, and now sails the
    world with Christine

[1] Who died fron a series of strokes a few years back in Toronto :(