NANOG, the North American Network Operators Group holds a tri-annual meeting that draws up to 1,500 mostly technical attendees, held in major cities throughout North America. NANOG is known as a “friendly co-opetition” and “safe space” intentionally created for network engineers, architects, and operators. Here, network operators gather to share and discuss peer-reviewed content from experts in the field, including keynotes from industry leaders, tutorials, in-depth analysis of issues, BoFs, and hackathons.
Since its earliest inception in 1987, the North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG) has been committed to the ongoing advancement of an open, secure, and robust internet, by providing a platform that inspires, educates, and empowers our community to meet the ever-changing demands of a global network, in service of building the internet of tomorrow.
NANOG77 in was held in Austin, Texas, a week before the Formula One Grand Prix. NANOG77 featured over 30 presentations, panels, tutorials, and lightning talks and had 1,121 registered attendees, including 320 NANOG members, 8 students, 15 NCI participants and 295 first-timers. Kate Gerry, NetActuate’s Director of Global Networking (and Party Supplies) attended NANOG77 and ARIN44.
In addition to NANOG, sub conferences or smaller conferences are scheduled at the same time to make use of the gathered mind share. This event included both ARIN44 and DNS-OARC, both of which include many overlapping members from the NANOG community. We also attended ARIN44, and work to attend DNS-OARC when possible.
During NANOG77, Paul Vixie and Karl Auerbach each gave a keynote address. There were two panel discussions and 17 talks that reviewed new technology, security, automation, and more. Discussion followed about internet speeds in underserved parts of the US and analysis was given of new DNS transports. Finally, lightning talks rounded out the session. Some of the topics of interest included:
DNS Wars: Episode IV (DoH)
Dr. Paul Vixie, CEO & Jedi Master
During the keynote by Paul Vixie, we learned the risks of DNS of HTTPS and why resolverless DNS (DoH) – RFC 8484 is a security concern. There was discussion around DoH being a political project, not a technical one, and an in-depth analysis of the concerns and impracticability of DoH was presented. (Of course, one need only look at the 500+ pages of flaming comments on the IEEE working group page for DoH to understand this.) Yet, it moves forward, seemingly unstoppable as a slow motion disaster in the making.
The Next Network Professional
Dave Temkin, Netflix
Dave Temkin from Netflix moderated a panel discussion with Najam Ahmad from Facebook, Anna Claiborne from PacketFabric, Levi Perigo from the University of Colorado, and Jack Waters from Zayo that discussed the differences between inclusion and diversity. It was noted that even in highly diverse environments, a large number of talented minority workers are still getting stuck in menial roles. An additional discussion addressed the topic of remote workers. Zayo recently took a strong move against remote work, relocating all of their remote staff to Colorado, stating it improved Zayo’s team communication. Anna Claiborne from PacketFabric shared that her company had the opposite experience.
SRV6+ aka SR-mapped-6 aka SRm6
Ron Bonica, Juniper
Ron Bonica presented a detailed look at SRV6+ by, running through its evolution, including new options for Per Segment Service Instruction Identifier and Per Path Service Instruction Identifier, and why SRv6+ preserves the best of SRv6. He also presented various deployment scenarios including PoC and experimental deployments. Ron noticed our very own, DatacenterDog in the front row of his talk and had her stand and wave to everyone as a fellow animal lover!
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical
Richard A Steenbergen, CEO – Petabit Scale
On Tuesday, Richard A Steenbergen gave a refresher talk on optical networks, and the technologies behind them, which we found very interesting because it included the latest solutions to bring 100Gbps on a single DWDM channel.
Your AS is Mine: BGP/IP Hijacking, the ICBM of the Cyber World
Chris Elverson, FBI and Tim Fowler, NCIS
Since IP address exhaustion has become a real issue, fraudsters are taking to hijacking IP ranges that do not belong to them. Chris Elverson from the FBI and Tim Fowler from NCIS discussed how their joint task force, NCIJTF, is working to combat LOA fraud, MITM traffic redirection, and other criminal activity seen on the internet.
Many other interesting topics were covered, including great talks on how to interview network engineers in the 21st century, a short history of the spine and leaf, a status update from the The African IXP Association: Regional Status Report and a second keynote entitled, “As the Internet becomes a lifeline grade utility, what is the impact on operators?”
ARIN44
On Thursday and Friday, Kate had the opportunity to attend the ARIN44 conference where we were able to discuss and vote for ARIN draft policies as well as speak with the ARIN board. ARIN is a nonprofit, member-based organization that administers IP addresses and ASNs in support of the operation and growth of the Internet. The community in the ARIN region decides how ARIN will manage and administer Internet number resources. These community decisions are recorded as policies.
We are looking forward to attending more ARIN meetings, where we can help define policies for ARIN in the future.
Closing
NetActuate looks forward to continuing its participation in these conferences, and enjoying the opportunity to meet with partners, customers. and experts from a wide range of technical roles and backgrounds.
Also, don’t forget to follow DatacenterDog on Twitter because dogs are awesome and we love datacenters.
