Bill Pretty - Building a Home Security System with BeagleBone

Bill Pretty began his career in electronics in the early 80s with a small telecom startup company that eventually became a large multinational. He left there to pursue a career in commercial aviation in North Canada. From there he joined the Ontario Center for Microelectronics, a provincially funded research and development center. He left there for a career in the military as a civilian contractor at what was then called the Defense Research Establishment, Ottawa. That began a career that was to span the next 25 years, and continues today.

Over the years, Bill has acquired extensive knowledge in the field of technical security and started his own company in 2010. That company is called William Pretty Security Inc. and provides support in the form of research and development to various law enforcement and private security agencies.

While this is Bill's first book, he has published and presented a number of white papers on the subject of technical security. Bill was also a guest presenter for a number of years at the Western Canada Technical Conference, a law-enforcement-only conference held every year in Western Canada. A selection of these papers is available for download on his website.

There are a number of people I would like to thank, for without their support this book would never have been started. My good friends Peter, Sam, Carol, Will, and Kelli for believing in me even when I didn't. To my life partner, Donna, who never stopped believing. And last but not least, my good friend and fellow code warrior Willie, the Mad Scott.

Toni de la Fuente is a Senior Solutions Engineer for Americas at Alfresco Software Inc. The highlight of his career is the more-than-14 years' experience he has in Systems Administration, Networking, and Security. He also has the LPI Linux and ITIL v3 certifications and is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE); recently, he has been certified as a AWS Technical Professional and AWS Business Professional.

He is an open source enthusiast, having founded different open source projects in previous years. He has participated in other open-source-related projects, such as Madrid Wireless, Fedora Linux, and OpenSolaris Hispano, and been referenced in books on network security. He is into teaching and regularly takes lectures, courses, and conferences at different events in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. He has also been contributing to the world of open source for more than 10 years with his blog http://blyx.com and through Twitter (@ToniBlyx).

I want to say thanks to Packt Publishing for their trust in me and to all the people who have spent tons of hours working at night making open sourceyou all make this world a better place, keep going.

Naoya Hashimoto has been working on Linux system integration and system and operation maintenance, both on premises and public cloud, for years. He has experience in planning, designing, and developing a new service to manage, maintain, and monitor a system on public cloud for 1-2 years in Japan.

His company is going to release a new service called Grow Cloud to manage, maintain, and monitor a system on Amazon Web Services this fall or winter in Japan. The customer support center supports Chinese, English, and Japanese. You can contact Naoya without hesitation if you have any question or are interested in our new service.

He has worked on books such as Icinga Network Monitoring and OSS DB Standard Text PostgreSQL (http://www.oss-db.jp/ossdbtext/text.shtml) and was also involved in the translation of some chapters from Japanese to English.

Thanks to Amit Ghodake, Akash Poojary, Vineeta Darade, and Amigya Khurana for giving me the opportunity to review , Protecting Your Network , of Building a Home Security System with BeagleBone , which was the second time to review technical books, the first time was Icinga Network Monitoring . I wouldn't have had the experience to review this book without my work with Icinga. Lastly, I'd like to express my gratitude to Forschooner, Inc. as they have given me the opportunity to publish a company blog about OSS system integration and maintenance, mainly in Japanese and a few in English.

Jaime Soriano Pastor was born in Teruel, a small city in Spain. He has always been passionate about technology and sciences. While studying Computer Science at the university in his hometown, he had his first contact with Linux and free software, which has deeply influenced his career. Later on, he moved to Zaragoza to continue his studies and there he worked for a couple of companies on quite different and interesting projects, from operative systems in embedded devices to the cloud, giving him a wide view of several fields of software development as well as opportunities to travel around Europe. He currently lives in Madrid. Configuration management and continuous integration form part of his daily work as a tools engineer in a well-known Internet company.

Norbert Varga has over four years of experience in the software and hardware development industry. He is responsible for embedded software development, hardware-software integration, and wireless telecommunication solutions at his current employer, BME-Infokom.

He has extensive experience in networking and hardware-software integration and has engineered advanced systems, including wireless mesh networks and smart metering solutions. He also has a strong background in Linux system administration and software development.