The InteropNET is billed as the world’s largest temporary network and over the years has visited places like: Tokyo, Sydney, Frankfurt, Paris, Mumbai, Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and many others. At one time the InteropNET had a seven city world tour. It’s made possible by a cadre of volunteers (YES, VOLUNTEERS!) that design, build, run and then tear down a network similar in size to a large office building. These folks have all applied with a mini resume posted to the volunteer site, then the InteropNET staff will pick the folks that fit the needs of the team. We’re looking for skills, but also willingness to work with the rest of the team, and ability to play well with others. The message you really need to take home on this is that you’ll be working with some of the best in the industry, people that have written a very large number of the Internet RFCs and have designed a massive number of new Internet technologies.
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Let’s be clear: I think virtualization is better than sliced bread and greener than Kermit the Frog. As a tree hugger, I love the fact that I’m turning off quite a few of my older inefficient servers and saving a whole lot of electricity. My carbon footprint is shrinking in leaps and bounds, but my frustration level also skyrocketed up until a few months ago when I started hearing about how network test tool vendors are addressing the virtualized environment.
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We had a big push this year to actually keep track of some of our more common statistics and events that occur in the network. Fortunately for us ScienceLogic, our Network Monitoring and Helpdesk provider, not only tracked everything that went on, but dug out some of the more interesting values. Louis DiMeglio has posted them on the Sciencelogic Blog
There is some more information on the help desk due out in a few days, but one of the most interesting thinges we found is that by offering DHCP on the show floor our end user configuration tickets dropped to essentially zero.
You can read Lou’s post here
The biggest concern when we put together configurations with a level of complexity that we’ve done for the NAC demonstrations is code rot. Code rot is the inexplicable degradation of a demonstration that occurs while the equipment is powered off and trekking across country in a truck. Now, we all know that nothing changes while the gear is packed up, right? As long as everything is physically fine when it arrives, we should plug in, turn on, and be ready to go.
…but it doesn’t always happen that way…
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The time is approaching when we’ll re-deply all of the InteropLabs NAC demonstrations in NY. Most of us will arrive tomorrow (although some team members are already on the ground) and expect to start set-up on Sunday morning. Interestingly, I’ve spent the past month tearing into NAC solutions from other vendors (for an upcoming InfoWorld Test Center review) that are an adjunct to the work we’re doing at the event. The attention that NAC is getting from the wide range of companies that are presenting various NAC solutions is fascinating, and demonstrates how the concept of “protecting your network from the devices” (as I like to say) is gaining a lot of traction.
From solutions developed by the traditional security teams like Symantec and McAfee and Trend Micro to those developed by the companies that make networking gear like Extreme, Enterasys, and Cisco, the interest in and development on these solutions knows almost no bounds.
What better reason to drop into the show and see the standards-based solutions that we’ve deployed and have available for you to spend some hands-on time reviewing?
See you there…
Even on day one for a number of the InteropLabs engineers, they are already pushing themselves beyond typical effort. It really does go beyond typical focus, with Chris writing code into Xsupplicant tonight even after a coast-to-coast early morning flight from Boston. He and Mike have been exchanging e-mail most of the day, making sure that Radiator and Xsupplicant are working well with the latest TNC updates.
Kevin is ready to stay here all night, but I’ve reminded him that this is day one and we need to pace ourselves to make it through.
The InteropLabs are different from the InteropNet here at Hot Stage due to the characteristics of the Labs. As a multi-vendor standards-based lab environment, we spend the first few days here at Hot Stage creating an infrastructure. After we’ve made sure that we have the components that we need (both hardware and software) and that we’ve set up what we need to get started, contributor engineers join us. They will spend two or three days with us helping us get the environment set up, demos completed, and documentation outlined, at least.
Then, we’ll pack it up, making sure that it’s as straight-forward as possible when we get to New York. It’s going to be especially challenging this time, since we will have two fewer days than usual to install on-site (we move in on Saturday).
By the time I’m likely to be able to post again, it’ll be Sunday night and we’ll be ready for the contributor engineers to arrive on Monday (although a few will sneak in over the weekend).
We’re grateful to the companies and engineers who invest in this experiment. Please plan to drop by the booth in New York, learn about these technologies, and let them know how vital the interoperability demonstrations are for you.
Steve Hultquist is a Contributing Editor with InfoWorld Magazine and is an independent consultant. For Interop New York he is responsible for leading the InteropLabs Network Access Control team.
Well, the InteropNet gang has been lazing around the joint since they showed up for their periodic sabbatical, but the InteropLabs team is arriving now, so we’ll get down to work. 
Since there is only one InteropLab in New York, I discovered today that there are a number of elements that we normally support in the common “core” ped that now require gear in ours. Most notably, the termination of the cable from the InteropNet to the InteropLab–which is fiber. We didn’t have any fiber ports or GBICs in our gear (didn’t need them until we were asked to take the lab to New York), and so we had to go rummaging…
One nice thing about the warehouse, of course, is that there is stuff to be found when you go rummaging. So, after a bit of looking with help from Padre, we found a Summit 24 with a fiber GBIC. After figuring out that there was a bit of Gigamon reconfiguration to do, we got the link up. Now, to get the switch reconfigured and installed in our rack…
The rest of the Lab team arrives tomorrow, and we’ll start gearing up. Getting the tables set up as they will be set up in New York, running cable, etc. We should have all of the Las Vegas stuff operational by the end of the day tomorrow. I’ll let you know..
Steve Hultquist is a Contributing Editor with InfoWorld Magazine and is an independent consultant. For Interop New York he is responsible for leading the InteropLabs Network Access Control team.
It’s hard to believe that it’s already rolling around for time to prepare for the Interop New York event, but it is. The Hot Stage event will be at the beginning of August, and we’ll be rolling the InteropLabs Network Access Control (NAC) team into Belmont for it.
Our planned demonstrations for the New York event parallel the Las Vegas demonstrations, with updates planned where they are viable. Once again, we’ll have demonstrations of the standards-based Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Network Connect (TNC), plus demonstrations of the evolving Microsoft Network Access Protection (NAP) code that will ship with Vista/Longhorn and Cisco’s Network Admission Control (C NAC). We also hope to once again show open source systems using the TNC specification.
If you were in ‘Vegas–or if you followed the blog even though you weren’t able to attend–we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for New York. We won’t have a ton of time to redesign or develop new demonstrations, but we would like to know the aspects that you find compelling to see if we can accommodate some of them.
Network Access Control continues to draw interest in enterprises desiring to protect their infrastructure from rogue devices, infected systems, and other inappropriate access. We aim to provide you an environment to “kick the tires” of this technology, find out how we roll it out, and get some “hands-on” insights.
See you there!
The show floor closed yesterday and after about an hour of tear down, our job was done. Of course, we kept on working till the very end, spending most of yesterday backing up config files and making little notes for documentation. Timmons was finally allowed to try and break our routers, which gave us some very interesting test results. This has been a great show and I think everybody on the team is going home with a lot of new knowledge and hoping we can do this again next year since there is tons of interest and so many things going on in the open source are.
Thanks to all who visited us in the booth, hopefully we will see you again next year!
I can not believe it is already the end of the second day and only one more day to go. These two days have really passed quickly and yes, we are most definitely having fun. Despite the fact that the ilabs booth is in the corner we seem to have a pretty constant, good flow in the oss area. It feels like I’ve been talking constantly for two days, which is probably pretty accurate, and so have most of our team members. And everybody I have talked to are really interested in what we are doing, asking lots of questions and spending a considerable amount of time here. It is really a lot of fun when people are so positive about what we’re doing. If anybody was every in doubt that open source was a hot topic, don’t be.
As is always the case at the end of the second day, we wish we had a few more days to work on this. But, today is the last day, and tomorrow at 3pm we’ll tear everything down. Before that, however, we will do some serious testing. I have promised Timmons that he will be allowed to attemt killing quagga, xorp and bird and simulate some attacks on our network with all his toys. We might wanna wait untill after lunch, though, before we start breaking our network, hopefully we’ll get a good crowd here tomorrow as well.
Jul 17th, 2009 |
