Post Networkshop

In my previous post, I expressed my intention to blog and twitter all the way through networkshop 36. I so failed. For several reasons, I think.

• Connectivity problems: at least initally, I couldn't get network access. There were technical dificulties with the installation, but there was wireless available. It's just that my eeepc hasn't been set up to do 802.1x, and that's what was available. This was resolved by the beginning of the first full day, but by then I'd not started at the start. Just to be clear, there were initial technical difficulties, but I could have gotten around it. I didn't. Ah well.
• What to say? When I was in a position to twitter live from the sessions, I sorta stalled, couldn't think of anything to say that would make any sense or give any value out of context.
• More connectivity problems: I tried to make up for not twittering on Tuesday by writing up a blog post Tuesday night from the hotel. But the hotel's proxy server was broken.

Enough with the excuses. I took some pretty cryptic notes, and will be posting a distilled version of what I found interesting/insightful from those.

For now, three highlights for me were;

The network monitoring BOF.
(Birds Of a Feather session. I don't know why). There seemed to be some agreement that we, the delegates, could benefit from trying to be a bit more of a community outside of networkshop, and share techniques, scripts etc related to monitoring and the configuration of monitoring systems.

There's a mailing list (I don't know if I'm supposed to advertise it's address, so I won't), and there was talk of a wiki. There seemed general agreement, so we'll have to see if we can make it happen. I'll give it a run, hopefully I won't be billy-no-mates.

One thing that strikes me often, and struck me during networkshop several times, is the apparent expectation amongst the academic networking community that everyone runs cisco kit. And everyone's happy to build systems that rely on cisco specific services. Which doesn't help me very much. And doesn't it sorta help cisco perpetuate lock-in? Perhaps I'm just feeling left out.

Alan de Kok.
The lead developer on the freeradius project, and by far the slickest speaker I saw. Sorry guys. More on this one later. Suffice to say that by the time he'd finished, I was grinning like a fool.

Celtic Music Radio.
Every year, there's a couple of sessions with a less narrow focus. This was one. There was a bit of networking involved, not much. But the speakers described building systems, with little money, and plenty of problems to work around. And a boat ferrying sewage and pensioners was involved.

And if you noticed me drifting off while you were speaking, I'm so very sorry. I'm past 40 now, and the afternoon nap is becoming an inevitability. At least, that's my excuse.