On 6/19/25 6:06 AM, Dobbins, Roland via NANOG wrote:

On Jun 19, 2025, at 19:55, Suresh Ramasubramanian via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:

End of an era

Fred was a friend, mentor, and pillar of the IETF and the operational community. His contributions to the industry are manifold, and he always took the time to work with and inspire others at all levels of participation.

I’m grateful to’ve known and worked with him; he left the world a better place as a direct result of his efforts, which is rare, indeed.

He will be missed.

Well, crap. This is horrible news to wake up to. Fred in many ways embodied what I thought the IETF was. He was chair at the time I came around in 1998 to Cisco so of course I had quite a bit of reverence for him. I still remember asking him about BGP routing and what prevented bad people from doing bad things with routes . I was having a crash course in security stuff for our VoIP work, so I started to see the rest of the world through that prism too. Not that I had anything to do with RPKI, but I may have been one of the first to bring that sort of concern to Fred's attention and that has lasted with me to this day. I could really piss Fred off too, so I was always surprised that he didn't seem to internalize it with me (I could be an asshole, that's for sure). We worked on a bunch of things off and on informally over the years, and Fred was even part of Cisco's initial cabal and foray into email/spam that would ultimately become DKIM which I doubt many people know.  But that's sort of how he struck me: that he wasn't a glory-seeker and most especially was approachable by cocky asshole engineers like me. What terrible, terrible news. RIP, Fred. Mike