Gert Döring studied Physics at the Technical University Munich in the early 1990s – right at the time of the Internet DotCom boom, which turned out to be much more interesting than calculus.
Besides routing and unix, one of the important issues at that time was “IP Address Management”, the unsolvable conflict between customer wishes and the need for address conservation. In 1997, Gert discovered IPv6, which promised to get rid of the whole wasted energy spent in IPv4 address scarcity management and having to find new workarounds again and again.
Since then, he has been quite active on various IPv6 related mailing lists, and attended many conferences, always trying to convince and sometimes even pushing, people and companies to deploy IPv6. Along that way, in 2003, Gert became chair of the Address Policy Working Group, and focused on a good IPv6 address distribution policy. He also helped steer RIPE and the RIPE NCC through the uneasy waters of IPv4 run-out.
These days, Gert is working as a freelancing network engineer, unix developer, IPv6 evangelist, and open source developer – most notably, maintaining the network side of OpenVPN.