TIP2013 - Day 1

Sunday, January 13th. Slightly jet lagged, but I was able to sleep intermittently until 4:45am, Hawaii time.

My computer gear on this trip, pictured below, comprises an 11" MacBook Air laptop, iPhone5, iPad2, and a portable 2TB drive. Taking the tiny MacBook Air rather than my normal bulky 15.4" MacBook pro laptop makes a big difference. Not as comfortable to type, but much much lighter. In encountered one unanticipated problem though. As I mentioned in the previous post, I was upgraded to a better room in the Ainahau tower, where I discovered they have no wireless Internet service, just wired ethernet (and the MacBook Air doesn't have an integrated ethernet port). I can't remember the last hotel (in this country) where I didn't have wireless, so it didn't even occur to me to bring the Air's separate USB ethernet dongle. Luckily, my colleague Richard Machida had one with him which he loaned to me a day later.

I took the 7:30am Joint Techs shuttle bus to the University of Hawaii campus. I sat next to Kevin Mayeshiro, from the University of California at Davis - who already knew who I was. It turns out my colleague Colleen Szymanik has spoken to him as a reference for Brocade Networks - Penn is evaluating Brocade as a candidate vendor for the next refresh of our campus core routers. Kevin grew up in Hawaii, so it was good to chat with someone with extensive local knowledge of our venue.

The conference venue is the University of Hawaii's "East West Center", pictured below with the line of folks waiting for registration/bag pickup.

Sunday is customarily a day occupied by tutorial sessions. I attended sessions on BGP Rover, RPKI, and DNSSEC.

Below: Dan Massey form Colorado State University talks about the BGP ROVER route origin verification system.

Below: RPKI (Resource PKI) tutorial/demo session run by Randy Bush of IIJ.

Below: DNSSEC tutorial by Michael Sinatra of ESnet.

In the evening, back in the hotel, I attended the Internet2 Connector's meeting. This is closed meeting of Internet2 and representatives of Internet2 connector networks (GigaPoPs, RONs etc). I usually represent the MAGPI Gigapop, which is a regional R&E Network run by Penn.

-- Shumon Huque

I'm in (so called) Paradise

[Actual date for the photos in this article: Saturday, January 12th 2013]

My colleague, Richard Machida (U of Alaska, Fairbanks), has been blogging from Hawaii, so I felt motivated to do the same. I'll post follow-up articles for each day of the conference.

I'm in Oahu, Hawaii to attend the Winter 2013 Joint Techs conference, hosted by the University of Hawaii in Manoa. Joint Techs is billed as an international conference of networking experts - and is one of the primary technical conferences for the US Research & Education networking community. Whenever in Hawaii, this conference conveniently changes its name to "Techs in Paradise". Also when in Hawaii, it is usually co-located with the APAN (Asia Pacific Advanced Network) meeting - APAN is the Asia Pacific's R&E network/organization. This time, a new format is being tried with a fully merged Joint Techs/APAN conference. As a result, we have quite a large attendance - almost 500 people, stressing the conference facilities a bit.

I chose an aggressive flight schedule that had me leaving Philly at 6:30am and arriving at 1:30pm in Honolulu, if I made the 32 minute (!) connection in San Francisco. Thankfully I did, so I had some daylight to walk around Waikiki a bit and take some photos.

Weather on Oahu so far has been sunny with periods of rain, and temperatures reaching the high 70's (farenheit). Temperature forecast from the local news:

Here are some photos from my flight and from around Waikiki. The complete and growing set, which includes photos from the TIP2013 conference too can be seen on my Google Plus album.

An aerial shot of the Golden Gate bridge and the Presidio Park, from my flight out of San Francisco, shortly after take-off.

 Some aerial shots of Oahu from my flight into Hawaii. The first shows a portion of Eastern Oahu including the Mokapu peninsula and Kailua. If I was on the left side of the plane, I might have been able to get a few photos from directly above Diamond Head, but I saw a lot of clouds in that direction, so it may not have been visible (I have some good shots of that side from a previous trip which I might post later).

The following photo is from directly above Waikiki beach (a detailed crop of a larger photo I took). A large part of Waikiki, Waikiki Beach, and a portion of the Ala Wai canal (which diverts mountain stream water around Waikiki) can be seen.

Diamond Head, probably Hawaii's most famous landmark, is a dormant volcanic crater, created by a relatively recent eruption (ie. geologically speaking; 150,000 years ago). The south western tip, the highest point of the crater rim stands 761 feet high. It's possible to hike all the way to the top (which I've done several times before).

 Another view from Kapiolani Beach Park (a much more tranquil place than Waikiki Beach):

The conference hotel is the Sheraton Princess Kaiulani, which is about a block from the beach. I got upgraded to a "partial ocean view" room due to my SPG gold status, but it isn't really much of a view:

At the last TIP (2008), we occupied a swankier hotel, the Sheraton Waikiki, which was right on the beach, and where I also got upgraded to an ocean view room. Here's a photo from my room at that time - it was designed so that you could seen Diamond Head while you showered from the bathroom (top half of shower curtain was transparent), which was a bit weird. The Sheraton Waikiki has since become even more upscale and I'm told its prices are now out of the range of Joint Techs.

A few other photos:

Link to rest of photos.

Shumon Huque

USENIX LISA 2012 courses

I taught two courses at last month's USENIX LISA 2012 conference in San Diego, California. One on IPv6 and another on DNS and DNSSEC. Each had about 60 attendees and they both went very well.

Slides for the IPv6 course are available at:
http://www.huque.com/~shuque/doc/2012-12-IPv6-Tutorial-huque.pdf

Slides for the DNS and DNSSEC course are available at:
http://www.huque.com/~shuque/doc/2012-12-DNS-DNSSEC-Tutorial-huque.pdf

I also participated in the Internet Society's ION conference, where I moderated a panel on "Advancing the Network: Where We've Been and Where We're Headed". Participants on my panel were Ron Broersma (DREN), Paul Ebersman (InfoBlox), John Spence (Nephos6), and Paul Mockapetris (Nominum, and the inventor of the DNS).

A few photos from my trip are available on my Google Plus page.

--Shumon Huque