Background
Gerhards was born in Geilenkirchen, Germany.
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Rainer Gerhards
Edit Profilesoftware engineer network engineer
Career
He began developing Rsyslog in 2004, to forward log messages in an Internet Protocol Network from Uniplex Information and Computing System and Unix-like computer systems In 1988, Gerhards founded the company RG Informationssysteme, which was later rebranded as Adiscon GmbH in 1997. Since childhood he had keen interest in computing and in 1983 he started professional computing on Univac 1100 mainframes.
Gerhards was a frequent speaker at various conferences during early 90"s which drawn his interest into network consulting.
In 1996, while consulting one of his client, Gerhards heard about Computer data logging that records log events while an operating system runs after that he started working on logging and developing network and protocol software based on lieutenant Gerhards focused on the IETF syslog standardization and authored four RFCs on syslog.
He wrote the base Reconstruction Finance Corporation 5424, which describes the syslog protocol architecture and stack. He used his software projects as testbeds for IETF standardization including rsyslog for the development of Reconstruction Finance Corporation 5424, Reconstruction Finance Corporation 5425, and Reconstruction Finance Corporation 5426.
He implemented Reconstruction Finance Corporation 3195, the syslog over Reconstruction Finance Corporation 3080 protocol.
Later, Gerhards designed the Reliable Event Logging Protocol, and its predecessor Simple Event Transport Protocol (SETP). In 2004, he started working on rsyslog project and later on other open source logging projects,including Project Lumberjack, Adiscon LogAnalyzer, liblogging, and librelp on Linux system logging infrastructure. From 1988, he had started working on the open source projects during his early career.
He wrote a library for portable graphics as well as a portable data exchange tool (cugcpio) and released it as public domain software.
This code was distributed on Diskette by the C User"s Group. In 1996, Gerhards wrote the first syslog server for Windows, that was launched by his company, Adiscon.
In 1997 he wrote the first ever Windows Event Log to syslog forwarding tool and invented this class of software. The tool EventReporter was not able to make the prominent share in the market, however it was a base by Gerhards and other developers to create similar tools.
While developing this tool further, Gerhards designed a forwarding tool for Microsoft Internet Information Server log files, based on a paper by him and Doctor Tina Bird.
Membership
He was appointed as the head of data center of Dörries GmbH (member of Voith group) where he introduced a company-wide Personal Computer network and was among the first in Germany to utilize Windows in larger-scale environments. As a board member of Mitre"s Commission on the Rules for the Approval of the Electrical Equipment effort, he worked on standardizing event expression formats and providing interoperability between different logging systems
