Nanog 50 notes 4 - 6 October 2010

Last week's North American Operators Group meeting was in Atlanta - without a sponsor, I don't attend the meetings in person. However, the subject matter is important, so I listen to the talks. This event had better quality audio and video than on previous occasions - the feeds available were the same, but the consistency with which they were available was much better. I used the Live HD VLC direct link at http://hidef.nanog.org:8080

Richard Steenbergen's talk on 4 October reviewed changes in the size of the Internet global routing table, February - September 2010, possible reasons for the growth, and ways to reduce the size of the table (so as to be able to carry traffic from more places while reducing the processing and memory requirements on the routers).

This is one of those topics where there are only a few hundred people in the world, if that many, who understand the dynamics of the global routing table, and they are retiring faster than new people are coming in to the business. Of those few hundred, only a handful are capable of developing new protocols, or improving on the existing, rather fragile, state of affairs.

Traffic engineering - controlling which packets take what paths into and out of ISPs - requires more specific addresses, which make more work. There are clear signs of incompetence, too - some small countries, with very few physical routes, are deaggregating much more than can possibly be useful. Geoff Huston pointed out that contrary to intuition, his measurements indicate that more BGP routes do not lead to more BGP churn. Chris Morrow suggested that there are very few tools to help do this well - more education and more protocol work would both help.

Phil Smith's BGP tutorials have background and pointers for how to get started (see the Agenda)

On 5 October, Greg Hankins from Brocade put together a wide ranging review on the current state of Ethernet .. there's a good list of 40G and 100G physical layer specifications for different distances; an overview of IEEE 802.3ax-2010 Energy Efficient Ethernet, just approved; useful remarks on the status of MPLS and OAM for Carrier Ethernet; some good diagrams describing what Cisco called Data Center Ethernet and is now called Data Center Bridging, for carrying SAN and LAN traffic on the same Ethernet; and a summary on the replacements for Spanning Tree, comparing TRILL and Shortest Path Bridging. All this in 59 slides and 30 minutes.

Brian Martin from CERN (Geneva) described how they monitor the network supporting one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Graphical representation for various levels of detail for 8000 ports is necessary, but difficult - they built a hierarchical model.

Don Lee described the experimental LISP (Locator ID/Separation Protocol - Dino Farinacci's work) implementation he's done for IPv4 and IPv6 at Facebook - despite Facebook's scale, the amount of configuration work was small, and the installation time short. Planning and design took longer.

The great majority of the presentation material is linked to the Agenda, and the video usually gets posted to the meeting archives - it's not there yet, as of 11 October.

The next meeting is in Miami, January 30 to February 2, 2011

References
Agenda
Atlas experiment at CERN
Nanog 50 presentation archive
Nanog 51 details

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