Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Day 2 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs

I'm looking forward to the IVI presentation being done by Indiana University in an hour. IVI was deployed at Texas A&M at the last Joint Techs and it worked well enough that I was thinking of trying it out in Alaska. It has also been successfully used at Nanog and ARIN meetings but I have learned that they got it running on a host and ship that host around from meeting to meeting. At the joint Techs, the host institution has the responsibility for providing the network and each time, it is like starting from scratch. So here they are using SLAAC (Stateless Address Autoconfiguration) as opposed to IVI and dhco that they used at A&M. It is a given that most organizations, especially universities, would not be happy using SLAAC since they no longer have the information they need to identify users. Universities tend to want that information to address complaints. One thing that universities need to change, UA included, is some sort of anonymization of netflow data before it is presented publicly. That is why I have some security on the netflow tools on the Barrow server. We don't want anyone outside of the network group to be able to view the raw flows. It would be nice if there was a tool to correlate IP address with AS. With the removal of the last octet of local address, that may be sufficient for reporting of the flow data. Hmmm, time to look around.

1:45 pm - The main problem with IVI appears to be that it is built on a really old linux kernel from somewhere around 2002. Driver support is almost nonexistent. Apparently, once it is up and running, it works fine. Here they had a problem with getting it to run on the hardware identified and once it was running, IPv6 - IPv6 traffic wasn't routing properly and the OS X dhcp client wasn't updating the dns field in the config. The other problem seems to be the consumption of a /40 of address space. (/32 prefix, followed by FF, followed by the IPv4 destination address) Interesting software. Maybe it's worth looking into....

3:45 pm - There is a new version of the performance monitoring software out and I am currently downloading it. I have two machines running the older version and the new one has a lot more management capability including the ability to regularly schedule tests. This would allow regular testing to see if there are problems, you may be able to correlate it with a change in the network. Ironic that I just downloaded the ISO this morning right before the announcement of the new version.

10:31 pm - Another late evening. I just got back to my room. Nothing formal today just a reception followed by a pilots BoF. I learned how to fly over 25 years ago and according to them, that was close enough. There was a great DC-3 story as well as stories about flying gliders in Colorado and 170's in Anchorage. These Joint Tech meetings are great since I know a number of the other participants. Many are former students from the many IPv6 and multicast workshops I've taught over the years and the fact that they are having the meeting in Fairbanks in a couple of years. A lot of people want to come up to Alaska though very few want to come up in the winter...

I did get a little bit of walking in between the last session and the reception but nowhere near enough. I was thinking of going back and walking on the treadmill but I got sucked into the pilots BoF.

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