Workshop on Future Directions of Network and Service Management

Together with Aiko Pras and Gabi Dreo Rodosek, I started to organize a joint EMANICS Workshop on Future Directions of Network and Service Management, which will take place in October in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers, operators, vendors and technology developers to identify promising future directions of network and service management research. The outcome produced by the workshop should be a description of research directions that is felt worthwhile to explore in a timeframe of the next five years.

66. IETF / 20. NMRG / NETCONF Interim in Montreal

I have spend the last week in Montreal where I attended the 66th IETF meeting. The very first IETF meeting I have ever attended was during the summer 1996 in Montreal as well - so I had the pleasure to celebrate 10 years of IETF participation in this nice city where I also got my first IETF experiences. The IETF has changed quite a bit since 1996 - but the funny thing is that the total number of participants back in 1996 in Montreal was 1283 while we had 1257 participants this time in Montreal, almost exactly the same size (again) after then years. What really has changed during the last 10 years, however, is the overall spirit - not only have I become 10 years older, the whole IETF has become 10 years older and the organization shows some clear signs of an aging organization. During the IETF week, we had the 20th NMRG meeting (another reason to celebrate?) where we discussed onging work on network management trace collection and analysis. The IETF week ended with an interim meeting of the NETCONF working group, during which I helped to integrate the notification proposals. I was also curious to see how NETCONF will deal with agent initiated notification delivery over SSH but the WG present in the room was smart enough to declare this out-of-scope for the time being. So the ISMS working group has to solve this puzzle.

libssh vs libssh2

It seems that SSH C libraries have become popular but there is not yet a clear winner in the open source scene. One implementation is called libssh while another totally independent implementation is called libssh2. This is pretty much confusing…

Invited Talk at EuroNGI 2006

I went to the EuroNGI conference in Valencia, Spain, to give an invited talk on network management perspectives. EuroNGI is another European Network of Excellence, mainly focussing on the packet forwarding plane. I went to Valencia to make them aware that operational and management aspects of new features in the forwarding plane should be considered during the design process and that a whole systems perpective is needed to understand the practical impact of novel ideas in the forwarding plane. It was nice to interact with another European NoE, which is also much bigger than EMANICS.

ISMS at the 65. IETF in Dallas (Remote Participation)

The 65th IETF meeting takes place this week in Dallas. Today was the meeting of the ISMS working group, which I co-chaired from my office at IUB. The audio stream from Dallas had at least the quality of international conference calls and jabber allowed me to ask questions, thanks to the jabber scribes. Since remote participation worked pretty well and saved a lot of travel, I might do this again…

EMANICS Meeting in Zürich

On March 15-17, I have been on the first EMANICS workpackage meeting where we tried to work out more detailed work plans for the work packages. The meeting was hosted by the University of Zürich and was quite productive. Now let’s see whether the partners all followup on their work commitments…

ISMS Interim Meeting in Boston

I am just returning from an interim meeting of the ISMS working group of the IETF. The goal of the meeting was to figure out how to send SNMP notification over SSH. The meeting was a success in the sense that we managed to establish a common ground between SNMP experts, SSH experts, and RADIUS experts. However, we did not solve the notification problem - but we understand it better now.

EMANICS Kickoff Meeting in Munich

The kick-off meeting of the EMANICS project took place in Munich, hosted by the University of the Federal Armed Forces. While the service on the campus was excellent, it was surprising how difficult it was for the hotel to provide warm water and for Munich to deal with the snow situation. I expected Munich to be better prepared for weather like this.