On February 15/16, I have participated in the VoIP meeting organized by the EMANICS project in Munich. I keep learning new stuff about VoIP whenever I go to those meetings and what really concerns me is that VoIP technology ignores security to a large extend and hence lots of simple attacks are feasible. The folks from INRIA gave a nice demonstration (and also killed a Cisco access point).
This afternoon, the research and education network as well as the PlanetLab machines hosted at Jacobs University went offline. Our router reported a problem with a watchdog event. We quickly brought up identical replacement hardware - but the problem did persist. After some debugging, we finally figured out that one of our PlanetLab nodes started this afternoon to send packets that trigger an obscure bug in one of the Ethernet drivers of the OpenBSD based software router we use. We finally applied a one line patch and since then everything is fine again. (Of course, this all happened while we were facing a paper submission deadline. ;-)
It seems that the name change of our little university makes progress and I will now mentally switch over to use Jacobs University Bremen instead of the old name. Note that such a name change also implies that Internet names will change and this will also affect this web page. So if you are in doubt, google for my name. ;-)
I am taking part in the Sichtweisen series of public lectures this Spring. On Monday 16th April 2007, I am talking together with my colleague Christian Roßnagel about networking, trying to explore commonalities and differences between social and computer networks. I expect this to be a lot of fun for all parties involved.
I just received an Apple 24’' iMac, an incredible toy to play with. Not sure how much it increases productivity; but I am sure it increases the fun at work. And yes, it has features that are really useful which I did not had before - just wait for my first multimedia podcasts to happen…
The EMANICS project did hold its second General Assembly this week in London on January 15-17, hosted by Imperial College. The meeting was followed by a one day meeting with the Scientific Council, which gave helpful advise to the project. London, as usual, is a nice place to be (once you manage to convince the tube to bring you to your destination).
A new version of scli and gsnmp has been released. This was motivated by a promotional article about scli in the Debian Package of the Day column.
The specification how to run the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) directly over IEEE 802 local area networks has just been published as RFC 4789.
I have complete a book chapter “Internet Management Protocols”. The chapter starts with a discussion of requirements. It then continues to introduce some architectural concepts before it describes the basic concepts of the protcols SNMP, NETCONF, SYSLOG, and IPFIX. The chapter is expected to appear in an Elsevier “Handbook of Network and Systems Administration” edited by Mark Burgess and Jan Bergstra.
I am involved in a special event where we (my colleague Michael Kohlhase and myself) like to explain how the Internet works to young children of the age 7-11. This event is one of our contributions to the German “Jahr der Informatik” (year of computer science). For more information, see our special web page “Wie funktioniert das Internet? (meanwhile offline)”.