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So, I had an opportunity to attend NANOG47. I was actually one of five of the employees from my company who were there, which is a lot. I only ended up meeting up with two of them, though. People were pretty scattered most of the time. Actually, if it weren't from the newcomers breakfast where we all stood up and said who we were and our employer, I would have missed them entirely.
NANOG47 was held in Dearborn, Michigan at the Hyatt Regency Dearborn hotel. The hotel is within walking distance from the Ford worldwide headquarters:
The weather wasn't all that bad, but I wasn't outside too much. However, inside the ballrooms, where most of the presentations were, it felt like they had the air conditioning on, or something. It had to be 65-68°F. I wore my jacket the whole time when I was outside my hotel room.
Just like all NANOG meetings, there was a wireless network with a couple ESSIDs on various frequencies providing a range of services. The nanog-arin-a (ARIN too, because the ARIN XXIV conference was back-to-back with NANOG47) ESSID provided IPv4 and IPv6 services via 802.11a, the nanog-arin ESSID via 802.11g, and the nanog-arin-v6only ESSID just provided IPv6.
I tried out the IPv6-only ESSID at first. I could hit all prolixium.com services (web, DNS, mail, XMPP), which really wasn't any surprise. Google, Cogent, Hurricane Electric, FreeBSD, ARIN, NANOG, etc. all worked. I was a little surprised that the command-line whois utility on Linux worked just fine, too, although I only queries I tried were for ARIN IPv6 addresses.
So, I used the other two ESSIDs the rest of the conference. My wlan0 interface looked like this most of the time:
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:13:02:17:89:2a
inet addr:192.35.166.229 Bcast:192.35.167.255 Mask:255.255.252.0
inet6 addr: 2620:0:ce0:1:213:2ff:fe17:892a/64 Scope:Global
inet6 addr: fe80::213:2ff:fe17:892a/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:259 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:77 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:28081 (27.4 KiB) TX bytes:9265 (9.0 KiB)
The mentioned ESSIDs actually made their way up to the 10th floor of the hotel via extensions of the VLANs or WDS. I had to pay for Internet access the first night (ugh, T-Mobile) since I arrived early, but the rest of the week I was set. That being said, the connectivity up on the 10th floor was pretty lossy most of the time.
I believe the NANOG connectivity from the hotel was provided by a 50Mbit/sec pipe by AT&T to Ann Arbor, and then from there via the Merit Network & Internet2 + peers. IPv4 traceroute looked like this:
% traceroute -q1 dax.prolixium.com. traceroute to dax.prolixium.com. (69.9.189.182), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 rtr01.nanog.merit.net (192.35.164.1) 4.099 ms 2 198.108.90.53 (198.108.90.53) 8.717 ms 3 xe-0-0-0x76.wsu5.mich.net (198.108.23.9) 14.567 ms 4 198.109.37.22 (198.109.37.22) 23.015 ms 5 xe-2-0-0.0.rtr.newy32aoa.net.internet2.edu (64.57.28.74) 29.150 ms 6 198.32.118.47 (198.32.118.47) 28.727 ms 7 0.te6-1.tsr1.ewr1.us.voxel.net (208.122.20.129) 29.310 ms 8 0.te1-49.dsr1.lga6.us.voxel.net (208.122.44.122) 29.806 ms 9 0.ge0-1.esr2.b3.lga6.us.voxel.net (208.122.5.42) 39.524 ms 10 dax.prolixium.com (69.9.189.182) 33.308 ms
And IPv6 like this:
% traceroute6 -q1 dax.prolixium.com. traceroute to dax.prolixium.com. (2001:470:8ad6:4::a), 30 hops max, 80 byte packets 1 2620:0:ce0:1::1 (2620:0:ce0:1::1) 2.805 ms 2 2001:48a8:7fff:3::1 (2001:48a8:7fff:3::1) 7.135 ms 3 2001:48a8:48ff:ff01::5 (2001:48a8:48ff:ff01::5) 15.663 ms 4 10gigabitethernet4-1.core1.chi1.he.net (2001:504:0:4::6939:1) 20.172 ms 5 10gigabitethernet2-4.core1.nyc4.he.net (2001:470:0:4e::2) 40.099 ms 6 1g-bge0.tserv4.nyc4.ipv6.he.net (2001:470:0:5d::2) 42.134 ms 7 dax.prolixium.com (2001:470:8ad6:4::a) 43.791 ms
Since everyone had public (and unfiltered) IPv4/IPv6 addresses on their laptops, it was funny to see all the Symantec & McAfee pop-ups on people's screens for attacks coming from the Internet. I feel sorry for the folks who will be bringing malware back to their corporate networks. Should have used a firewall or HIDS (or GNU/Linux)! There were also LOTS of MacBooks and iPhones on the network. I took a small sampling of the mDNS messages that were clogging the airwaves here (warning, large text file). Is mDNS getting worse than NetBIOS broadcasts? At least my laptop wasn't one of the ones announcing itself to the network saying HACK ME, PLEASE!
Anyway, onto the interesting stuff. Most of the talks and presentations were interesting (agenda with all the presentations is here). If I had to sum them all up in a couple lines, it would be something like this:
Some of the presentations were fairly interesting. I'll go over some of the highlights.
Tutorial: How to Accurately Interpret Traceroute Results: This was excellent. Basically Richard Steenbergen went over possible reasons for latency, cheat sheet of CLLI codes and router naming schemes, and impact of MPLS as it relates to traceroutes. I'd suggest anyone who is in an operational role read this.
Scripting on Routers: (first presentation, second presentation): I've actually started to write some op scripts on JUNOS, recently, and this stuff is very powerful. However, and some people pointed this out after the talk, most companies won't let you do this for fear of a typo taking out all routers at once. I think we as a community need to just bite the bullet and get over this fear - networks aren't getting smaller, and if we have to configure each router by hand, operators days are going to get very long.
Virtual Aggregation: This is a protocol designed to decrease the FIB sizes on smaller routers in the enterprise, as the DFZ grows larger and larger. I don't necessarily think it's a great idea, mostly because it's quite complex and can put a large burden on the puny CPUs that oversee the routing protocols in most routers. As I said earlier, I don't think there's really an easy (or good) way of aggregating prefixes you don't own.
BGP#: A System for Dynamic Route Control in Data Centers: Sorry, I think this is an awful idea, too, but well presented. Chao-Chih described an extension to BGP (BGP#) that would essentially allow applications (well, the "MultiSpeaker" peers) to control traffic flow in a data center via an API. Half of the presentation sounded like load-balancing, while the other half sounded like real routing. Either way, I think it's a bad idea for an external party to influence routing decisions and traffic flow. Let's just stick with health checks on load-balancers, please? It's quite possible that I missed the point, too :-)
IEEE P802.3ba 40 GbE and 100 GbE Standards Update: Sounds like we're almost there with really fast Ethernet (~2010). It's too bad that the distance for the copper PHYs was decreased to 7 meters from 10 meters. I guess it just didn't hold up. The QSFP transceiver seems like a natural extension of the SFPs we use today, and the CFP modules look a little too large for typical use. The new MPO fiber plug looks interesting, but I'll have to see it for myself.
RSTP to MST Spanning-Tree Migration in a Live Datacenter: Interesting. I've never really thought about using MST vs RSTP, but with all the VLANs and flexibility applications and servers need, it may be something to look into. A ~40 second outage window for the core wasn't too bad, although in my organization I suspect it wouldn't sit too well.
The Future of Internet Exchange Points: I don't know if I just interpreted this oddly, but it seemed like the whole gist of this presentation was: L2 sucks, L3/MPLS is good. In general, I think that's the way networks (campus, DC, etc.) are going these days, due to the security and reliability problems with L2 environments (spanning tree, etc.). However, it's suggested that exchanges just build lots and lots of MPLS L2VPNs (pseudowires) between peers. Not sure about this - it's a little wasteful of IPv4 space, and it requires more work on the IX'es side. Maybe not, though?
BGPbotz: Cool idea. I added this guy to my XMPP list and sent it a few commands:
(02:02:19 PM) prox@prolixium.com/Pidgin: sho ip bgp 208.122.0.0
(02:02:20 PM) bgpbotz@jabber.research.merit.edu: show ip bgp 208.122.0.0
BGP routing table entry for 208.122.0.0/20
Paths: (1 available, best #1, table Default-IP-Routing-Table)
Not advertised to any peer
11537 29791
198.108.93.41 from 198.108.63.41 (198.108.63.41)
Origin IGP, metric 279, localpref 110, valid, internal, best
Community: 237:1 237:1300 237:11537 1299:2609 1299:5769 11537:25200 29791:100
Extended Community: RT:11537:1
Last update: Sun Oct 18 02:07:54 2009
(02:02:25 PM) prox@prolixium.com/Pidgin: ping 69.9.189.182
(02:02:27 PM) bgpbotz@jabber.research.merit.edu: ping 69.9.189.182
PING 69.9.189.182 (69.9.189.182) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 69.9.189.182: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=20.9 ms
64 bytes from 69.9.189.182: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=19.8 ms
64 bytes from 69.9.189.182: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=19.7 ms
--- 69.9.189.182 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 1999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 19.760/20.158/20.907/0.554 ms
Although, I don't really have a problem with opening up a CLI and starting a telnet session to route-server.nlayer.net and others.
National Broadband Plan: The FCC guy was here. He gave a presentation about traffic engineering and national broadband. I just have a really sick feeling about this whole thing. I don't think the government should be involved in this, at all. I guess I don't have anything interesting to say about it.
So, the rest of the presentations either revolved around IPv6 or DNSSEC, or I just didn't find them too interesting. The IPv6 presentations were interesting, but not all that helpful to me. Most of them talked about deploying IPv6 in the core or the backbone, and that's the easy part! Nobody wanted to talk about IPv6 in the enterprise, on the LAN, or to backoffice applications. I guess take the easy road!
I also attended the peering track, which was basically 90 minutes where IX operators could give updates on their operations and plug new services (or more high-capacity ports). It also allowed smaller ISPs (and not-so-small) to give a small bio about their operations and ask others to peer with them. The highlight of this session was Hurricane Electric baking a cake for Cogent (see this message for history) to get them to peer with them. I saw the cake myself, it was real! Here's a photo:
On Wednesday evening we had a pizza & beer session up in the Rotunda of the Hyatt. On the 16th floor, the rotating (slowly) ballroom provided quite a view. I tried to take a photo, but it came out blurry:
All in all, a good conference. I took some other miscellaneous photos, and am posting them here.
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