InterMapper at NANOG48-Followup

I had a lot of fun at the NANOG48 conference. The presentations were great, many interesting people to speak with, and of course, the Beer 'n Gear session is always a hit. Some of the highlights of the conference for me:

• The entire discussion of Net Neutrality. The session was titled The Regulators Meet the Operators. Dan Golding from DH Capital gave a brief introductory presentation, encouraged people to read the FCC Notice of Proposed Rule Making (especially pages 41-51), then moderated a panel consisting of two representatives from the FCC (Jon Peha and Zachary Katz), Fred Baker (Cisco), Dave Temkin (Netflix) and Patrick Gilmore (Akamai).
  
• Avi Freedman's BGP 101 and BGP 102 tutorials on Sunday afternoon were a rapid-fire introduction and detailed discussion of using BGP.
• Mark Koster from ARIN presented a RESTful Whois service that looks interesting. This API gives a clean interface to information about a host without having to parse and deal with the grubby details of varying whois implementations.
  
• Mark Koster also talked about a potential "perfect storm" in networking technologies that will become mandatory in the next 12-18 months. These include:

• IPv4 address space exhaustion (in late 2011 or early 2012)
• IPv6 as a replacement (working now, but not widely deployed outside the backbone)
• 4-Byte AS Numbers (assignments have been held off for ~12 months, while the community gets its tools together)
• DNSSEC (the root zones/DNS servers are in the process of being signed now.)

• Although these technologies already can work together (the core of the Internet is using them, by and large), downstream network operators around the world will have to make sure they can operate with or at least alongside these technologies. Otherwise, their customers will be off the air or at least significantly degraded until the upgrades can be put in place.
  
• Dartware's table at the Beer 'n Gear. It was terrific meeting all the customers who knew about our software and new people who didn't. We showed off the InterMapper network monitoring software with a couple customer's networks. Thanks to Aaron Hughes (6Connect) and Tony Kapela (5NinesData) for direct access to their servers so that we could show real maps with live data. We also showed the InterMapper Flows NetFlow and sFlow analysis software, and how it integrates into the InterMapper GUI.
  

The InterMapper table with the booth staff. From left to right, Gurdev Sethi, Product Manager at Dartware, John Murphy, Software Engineer at ProQueSys, and Rich Brown, Dartware.











Several attendees at the InterMapper table. Tony Kapela is pointing at the screen, James Stahr is chatting with Rich Brown on the right, John Murphy in the background.

Free Software! We will extend the promotion that we handed out to NANOG48 attendees. Go to this URL before 31 March 2010 (http://intermapper.com/nanog) and sign up for free licenses to InterMapper (monitor up to ten devices), and InterMapper Flows (monitor the past hour's NetFlow and sFlow traffic from a single exporter). Both these licenses are non-expiring, and you'll be able to use them forever on a small network (say, at home? :-)