I Dislike Tech Conferences for the Most Part…

There was a time in my life that I went to a lot of tech conferences.  The years 2010-2016 were pretty busy for me in terms of conferences, booths, speaking, attending, etc.  For the most part, I have very little interest in these events.  I think they are a huge waste of time outside of the socializing.  This week I took a half day on a Friday to attend the New England Peering Forum in Cambridge MA.  This was a small conference, with an interesting talk track and being local, I thought I would try it as the worse case outcome was I would leave early and start the weekend.

Smaller conferences and meet-ups fall into two categories for me: it was great or it was horrible.  Here are a few notes from the conference and it was half day with lunch and break and beers after the speakers.  Kind of the way I like my conferences.

The presentations are not posted yet, but some random thoughts and observations from the talks during the day:

RDP with Bluekeep: Apparently this disaster is about 4-6 weeks away from affecting the internet. Here is the link to the Wiki page.  The first talk was from Bob Rudis of Rapid 7 and he commented that it takes about ninety days for a vulnerability to be exploited by hackers. I am not a cyber security person by any stretch, but he thinks we are about a month from seeing the exploits hit the Internet.

Port 7547 Router Admin Port: Bob scanned the networks of the attendees and found open admin ports of routers.

RIPE Detail for all Internet Connections: Bob vocally advocated for RIPE level detail on network connections.

IPv4 vs IPv6 Adoption: There were two sessions on IPv6 adoption and a lively discussion concerning the buying of IPv4 addresses to avoid IPv6 adoption.  It was pretty interesting with some lively discussion around pricing, sales, tracking who is buying and who is not.  Not a topic that I have any expertise in, but I will say as having previously worked in a networking startup we prolonged IPv6 support as long as we could.  The reason? It turns about that everyone wanted to be IPv6 compliant, but most were not and that was very true in the data center. Customers we happy with a path to IPv6 in the future and the only customers I had who were really adamant about IPv6, were typically MSOs with a heritage in the cable business.

The Facebook team gave entertaining presentation on how they built resiliency into the service delivery platform. Today they are driving peering points deeper into the network edge with more localized content.

There was a presentation on redefining core and access as a new two-tier network model.I was looking forward to this presentation and it was interesting, but really nothing new for me.  Anyone who has been in the Open Networking, SDN and NetVirt battles over the past eight years has been down this path before.  There was a time that I posted a lot on these subjects on this blog:

• Feb 2016: Four Years Later
• August 2015: Networking Will Change
• April 2015: A Piece of Wanton and Profligate Ostentation
• September 2014: Beginning with a Different Perspective
• September 2014: Sales Call Gone Wrong and the Innovator’s Dilemma Moment
• June 2014: Do It Again Part 3: It is Easy to Believe in Self-Referential Data Sets
• June 2014: Do It Again Part 2: My Thoughts on the State of Networking June 2014
• October 2013: Future Generations Riding on the Highways that We Built
• September 2013: Just to tell our souls we’re still the young lions…
• June 2013: Fluidity of Network Capacity, Commoditization, DIY Openness and the Demise of the Network Engineer
• May 2013: The Bigger Picture – Beyond Incrementalism
• May 2013: SDN, It’s Free just like a Puppy!
• May 2013: Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love SDN
• May 2013: Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic

As always, my thoughts on these matters might be completely wrong.