TNC2006 in Catania - tuesday 16/5-2006

Tuesday morning. Walking from the hotel, I passed this elaborate building. The most extravagant Garage I have ever seen.

The morning session featured Michael R. Nelson of IBM, who held a very interesting talk about why politics is so important for our daily work, and for the future of the planet.





We may think that most standardization and choices are done by now, on the internet, but according to this speaker we are doing a lot of decisions these years that will shape our common future. Just a short glance a this list will convince you.

And we have an imprtant role to play in this process.

Danes: Thomas Danø from the Danish Technical University and Diba Markus from the Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark.

The guru of federations: Ken Klingenstein.

Nicole Harris from JISC...

...talking about federations in the UK...

and her roadmap really depicts a road!

Ueli Kienholz from SWITCH ...

...talking about SWITCHaai, the only nation-wide AAI structure in production in the world.



Half an hour before lunch, the wireless network connection stopped working. But within the hour, the problem was fixed by Claudio Allocchio, who detected that the error was due to a layer 1 problem: The very cable doing the gigabit uplink from the wireless equipment to the main network, was suddenly defective. Here, Claudio shows it as a trophy.

The people responsible for my first afternoon session (on security) are (from the left) Maurizio Aiello from the National Research Council in Italy, Rogier Spoor from SURFnet, Nicolas Fischbach from COLT Telecom and the chair Andrew Cormack from UKERNA.

The secretariat people are doing a wonderful job.

A well-known face at these conferences: Bernhard Fabianek from the European Commission (DG INFSO) who is obviously very proud of the GÉANT2 network.

Some of the people working hard while the rest of us are having a good time: Here it is John Dyer and Carol de Groot in the TERENA secretariat room.

Next session was chaired by Thomas Schmidt (standing), who will be chairman of next year's programme committee. The first speaker was Pierre Ansel from France Telecom who gave an insight into detecting misuse og wireless networks. It is always nice to get som insight into the methods instead of just buying a commercial piece of hardware.

Florian Prester from University Erlangen-Nuremberg told about a management system for a complex structure of routers, designed so du can do reconfiguration of the whole structure by just a single commnd.

This looks just like an old-skin Winamp that has gone berzerk. However, it is the university network monitor.

Josh Howlett from University of Bristol...


...talking about the Janet roaming service (JRS), which is the local version of eduroam. They had to adapt the eduroam concept in order get acceptance from the community, which could seem like a step in the wrong direction, but the ood news - as you can see at the bottom of this slide - is that only two universities are not providing 802.1x, but only web redirect.

Last speaker of the day was Eric Vyncke, destinguished engineer from Cisco, whose mission was the following: IP-telephony is only insecure if we do not apply the necessary precautions.


The terminal room.

In the evening I attended a nice BoF about how NRENs can cooperate about providing and developing services. The meeting was led by Magnus Strømdal from UNINETT.

It was discussed to integrate the exchange of services into the work of the TF-LCPM (and for once, the famous "Walter-figure" did not appear on the screen)

An interesing service that could be used by others is the network measurement initiative by UNINETT...

...presented by Arne Øslebø.

Another service under development is the SURFnet Canon, which is a sort of white-hat bot-net for simulating DDoS attacks and the like, letting users test the resilience of their service. We just prey that the control of that tool does not fall into the hands of the bad guys. Presented by Maurice van den Akker.

It has become somwhat a tradition for those of the Danish people who are not otherwise engaged to dine together on Tuesday evening of the TNC.

But next year, when the conference is in Denmark, I think we will have to skip this tradition. Therefore, there was even more reason to enjoy the relaxing atmosphere and the menu with "fish-in-everything".

Walking home after another very good day of TERENA Network Conference, through the beautiful city.

Martin Bech