Andreas Dolp

My first contact with the Debian project was in about 2004 in my early youth when installing gameservers. Because I'm not the most skilled gamer, it quickly turned out that installing and operating Debian servers makes much more fun to me than playing computer games. In the years around 2010 I did some smart home things on Debian. Since then, I always run at least one Debian server, either at home or sometimes even in a data centre. The OS of choice was exclusively Debian, mainly because it's stable, secure und very usable as well. So I think at least since then, I'm already convinced about Debian beeing the best server OS in the world.

During my studies I used Debian on the desktop as my main OS, too. Again because of it's stability, security and because major updates are that easy, so you can count on your system that is working well when you need it.

Since 2016 I'm working with Debian in an enterprise context, first as a security administrator, later since today as a security engineer. During that, I also got in touch with the network intrusion detection software Suricata and it's upstream Suricata community.

Because I love Debian (and Suricata), I would like to support Debian having always the newest version of Suricata, and so I started contributing by packaging newer Suricata versions since about mid of 2025. I'm part of the 'suricata packaging team' in Salsa contributing a lot to the suricata package and newly to suricata-update and libhtp, too. My previous work was on the packaging of the major upgrade of Suricata v7 -> v8, fixing lintian warnings, doing regular version updates and fixing security bugs (CVEs) in accordance with the security team (carnil) and doing point releases for trixie fixing minor things. I mainly worked with Sascha (satta), who mentored me very well during the last seven months and I'm very glad to be able to support him doing packaging work in the Suricata topic. To further enhance that, I would like to apply as a Debian maintainer to be able to do my own uploads for the named three packages.

Over the years, I've always looked for a chance to get more involved in the open source community and at least in one of the things I love. For that, I think I now do have enough skill and knowledge about how packaging and the Debian project works, so it would be great if I could contribute on my own now. Since I used Debian for over 20 years now - for free - it's a very great honour for me to spend my time being involed in this wonderful community and to be able to finally give something back to the project. Thank you for that!