It was announced yesterday that the name of our University is going to change to reflect some major financial support we are receiving from the Jacobs Foundation. Now it is too late for the Bill Gates out there to give their name to this University; but I am sure we still have lots of other stuff on campus where we still need nice names… On the technical side, I am sure that all our URLs will become invalid at some point in time (including this one). So be prepared to get a dangling link for your bookmark and use Google to find this page again.

I did attend the 2nd International Week on Management of Networks and Services Autonomic Component and System Management (MANWEEK 2006) in Dublin and I enjoyed the event and the location. We had very nice weather and did not need the umbrella which all participants received in their “survival” package. During MANWEEK 2006, I also attended the IM 2007 technical program committee meeting and helped (?) to shape the program. In my role as panels chair, I am very happy about the panels that were selected - I believe there will be some nice interesting and interactive sessions at IM 2007.

I am organizing a special issue in the Journal of Network and Systems Management (JNSM) on “Peer-to-Peer Technologies in Network and Service Management”. We received some 30 submissions for this special issue and just started the review process. The special issue is scheduled to appear in Fall 2007.

The 21st meeting of the Network Management Research Group took place in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The workshop was co-organized with EMANICS, in particular workpackage one. The goal of the workshop was to identify key research questions in the area of network and service management. The many discussions during the workshop were very interesting. However, much work is still ahead to organize the various thoughts into a research agenda. Stay tuned…

The specification how to run the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) directly over IEEE 802 local area networks has just been approved by the IESG. This transport mapping was written in order to help the IEEE 802.1aj working group.

I have made another attempt to use GPG for data that needs some proper protection. My past attempts basically failed because I never got a critical mass of people using GPG in my neighborhood (or worse, people could not even agree on the need to properly protect some type of information). Lets see how much success I will have this time… My public key can be found on my contact information web page.

I started to move some of my open source projects to Trac, a very nice system to support software development projects. Visit our Trac server to find out which software projects we already host.

I have created a new home page which is essentially a blog supplemented by a few more static articles. I am using nanoblogger, a cool piece of software which is essentially a bourne shell script.

I just returned from a two day meeting of EMANICS’ WP7 in Nancy. WP7 researches scalability in network management. IUB is involved with our work to be published at DSOM 2006 and our network management trace analysis work. Getting to Nancy really takes quite some travel time and I was lucky that the trains kept the schedule.

WP4 (Electronic Dissemination Environment) of the EMANICS project had a one day meeting today at IUB. The meeting was very productive in producing a plan how we want to evolve the presentation of the project in the future.