Cisco Live!

Today was the first day of the Cisco Live! Conference assuming you don't count the reception yesterday evening. The main purpose for the reception was to get everyone looking around at all of the vendor booths and to collect t-shirts and pens. There are a couple of products that I am really interested in taking a closer look at one is a flow collection and analysis tool and the other is a log analysis tool that correlates data from multiple sources. Less for the University than for the Barrow project. The first talk I went to this morning was on IPv6 security and the speaker outlined numerous risks and attack vectors that I haven't really considered. One of the takeaways was the importance of deploying IPv6 in the enterprise network and education and training. Especially for the security group. The other was on the risks associated with Microsoft Terado. I never really knew what it was but now that I know how it works, Microsoft should be shut down for including this tool with Vista without letting people know of the risks! There was the keynote given, as always, by John Chambers on the future direction of Cisco as well as the 30 areas that they are focusing their efforts. Seems like a big number to me but then again, Cisco is s big company. There was a session on multicast where the focus was completely different than any of the Internet² conference presentations. The focus here was service provider deployments and not enterprise. There was a very interesting presentation by NBC and their experience with the Bejing Olympics and the network that they set up to provide the support for their production. The focus was on the internal production network for delivering the HD video to their editors and producers and not on the content distribution side. Pretty interesting. A lot of multicast was used on their internal network to maximize utilization of their WAN links from China to the US. The last session i went to was on SIP trunking. It was a very Cisco CM centered presentation but it covered a lot of the issues

This was an IP phone that was at one of the vendor booths. The next time someone asks me for a flashy phone, I'll send him here. Obviously, this was not a real product but just something to get people to stop at their booth. My Mini9 lasted all day without being plugged in and it worked fine on their IPv6 wireless network. I'm one of the few who actually connected to their IPv6 site and registered but everyone using the wireless was going to Google using IPv6 as their transport whether they knew it or not. I'll be interested in the statistics if they ever release them. Instead of the turtle with the moving fins, they had a dragon waving its arms. Considering that there are 10,000 people at this conference and only 5 submitted their names on the IPv6 form is somewhat frightening. After all, these are all router jockeys, network engineering types. I guess that shows the state of IPv6.

According to the Nike+ site, this month is ending up with a respectable mileage. 208 miles so far this month. Not my highest but right in there with other months this year. I thought that it would be low with the trips to Barrow and San Francisco plus the Midnight Sun Run. (Very little training before but lots of resting afterwards.) I think that I'm really going to like the convenience of the Nike+ on the iPhone since I almost always carry that around. I still don't know if it keeps running in background like the other Apple apps since I just used it for the walk down to the convention center. I feel like I walked 5 miles during the day but none of that is logged since I was concerned about battery life. I ended up using the Dell quite a bit this morning due to a reported problem with voice mail in Barrow but it turned out to be a network issue and not a VoIP issue. But I think I came back with 30% of the battery even with several hours of wireless Internet usage. Not as much battery life as I was hoping for but I still really like the form factor. (2.18 lbs!)