I love tech conferences, especially when I get to be a speaker. Nothing makes me happier than to be given a platform to run my mouth.

For the last year or so I’ve been attending various Network Operators Group (NOG) meetings, and I recently got the opportunity to speak at the UK version, which they refer to as a Network Operators Forum (UKNOF). It was a lot of fun, so I thought I’d share what I learned.

UKNOF41 was held in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’d never been to Scotland before and I was looking forward to the visit, but Hurricane Florence required me to return home early. I ended up spending more time in planes and airports than I did in that city, and totally missed out on both haggis and whisky (although I did drink an Irn-Bru). I arrived Monday afternoon and met up with Dr. Craig Gallen, the OpenNMS Project representative in the UK. We had a nice dinner and then got ready for the meeting on Tuesday.

Like most NOG/NOF events, the day consisted of one track and a series of presentations of interest to network operators. I really like this format. The presentations tend to be relatively short and focused, and this exposes you to concepts you might have missed if there were multiple tracks.

UKNOF is extremely well organized, particularly from a speaker’s point of view. There was a ton of information on what to expect and how to present your slides, and everything was run from a single laptop. While this did mean your slides were due early (instead of, say, being written on the plane or train to the conference) it did make the day flow smoothly. The sessions were recorded, and I’ll include links to the presentations and the videos in the descriptions below.

The 41st UKNOF was held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, located in a newer section of the city and was a pretty comfortable facility in which to hold a conference. Keith Mitchell kicked off the the day with the usual overview of the schedule and events (slides), and then we got right into the talks.

The first talk was from Kurtis Lindqvist who works for a service provider called LINX (video|slides). LINX deployed a fairly new technology called EVPN (Ethernet VPN). EVPN is “a multi-tenant BGP-based control plane for layer-2 (bridging) and layer-3 (routing) VPNs. It’s the unifying L2+L3 equivalent of the traditional L3-only MPLS/VPN control plane.” I can’t say that I understood 100% of this talk, but the gist is that EVPN allows for better use of available network resources which allowed LINX to lower its prices, considerably.

The next talk was from Neil McRae from BT (video|slides). While this was my first UKNOF I quickly identified Mr. McRae as someone who is probably very involved with the organization as people seemed to know him. I’m not sure if this was in a good way or a bad way (grin), probably a mixture of both, because being a representative from such a large incumbent as BT is bound to attract attention and commentary.

I found this talk pretty interesting. It was about securing future networks using quantum key distribution. Current encryption, such as TLS, is based on public-key cryptography. The security of public-key cryptography is predicated on the idea that it is difficult to factor large numbers. However, quantum computing promises several orders of magnitude more performance than traditional binary systems, and the fear is that at some point in the future the mathematically complex operations that make things like TLS work will become trivial. This presentation talked about some of the experiments that BT has been undertaking with quantum cryptography. While I don’t think this is going to be an issue in the next year or even the next decade, assuming I stay healthy I expect it to be an issue in my lifetime. It is good to know that people are working on solving it.

At this point in time I would like to offer one minor criticism. Both of the presenters thus far were obviously using a slide deck created for a purpose other than UKNOF. I don’t have a huge problem with that, but it did bother me a little. As a speaker I always consider the opportunity to speak to be a privilege. While I joke about writing the slides on the way to the conference, I do put a lot of time into my presentations, and even if I am using some material from other decks I make sure to customize it for that particular conference. Ultimately what is important is the content and not the deck itself and perhaps UKNOF is a little more casual than other such meetings, but it still struck me as, well, rude, to skim through a whole bunch of slides to fit the time slot and the audience.

After a break the next presentation was from Julian Palmer of Corero (video|slides). Corero is a DDOS protection and mitigation company, which I assume means they compete with companies such as Cloudflare. I am always fascinated by the actions of those trying to break into networks and those trying to defend them, so I really enjoyed this presentation. It was interesting to see how much larger the DDOS attacks have grown over time and even more surprising to see how network providers can deal with them.

This was followed by Stuart Clark from Cisco Devnet giving a talk on using “DevOps” technologies with respect to network configurations (video|slides). This is a theme I’ve seen at a number of NOG conferences: let’s leverage configuration management tools designed for servers and apply them to networking gear. It makes sense, and it is interesting to note that the underlying technologies between both have become so similar that using these tools actually works. I can remember a time when accessing network gear required proprietary software running on Solaris or HP-UX. Now with Linux (and Linux-like) operating systems underpinning almost everything, it has become easier to migrate, say, Ansible to work on routers as well as servers.

It was my turn after Mr. Clark spoke. My presentation covered some of the new stuff we have released in OpenNMS, specifically things like the Minion and Drift, as well as a few of the newer things on which we are actively working (video|slides). I’m not sure how well it was received, but number of people came up to me afterward and say they enjoyed it. During the question and answer session Mr. McRae did state something that bothered me. He said, basically, that the goal of network monitoring should be to get rid of people. I keep hearing that, especially from large companies, but I have to disagree. Technology is moving too fast to ever get rid of people. In just half a day I was introduced to technologies such as EVPN and quantum key distribution, not to mention dealing with the ever-morphing realm of DDOS attacks, and there is just no way monitoring software will ever evolve fast enough to cover everything new just to get rid of people.

Instead, we should be focusing on enabling those people in monitoring to be able to do a great job. Eliminate the drudgery and give them the tools they need to deal with the constant changes in the networking space. I think it is a reasonable goal to use tools to reduce the need to hire more and more people for monitoring, but getting rid of them altogether does not seems likely, nor should we focus on it.

I was the last presentation before lunch (so I finished on time, ‘natch).

The second half of the conference began with a presentation by Chris Russell (video|slides). The title was “Deploying an Atlas Probe (the Hard Way)”, which is kind of funny. RIPE NCC is the Internet Registry for Europe, and they have a program for deploying hardware probes to measure network performance. What’s funny is that you just plug them in. Done. While this presentation did include discussion of deploying an Atlas probe, it was more about splitting out a network and converting it to IPv6. IPv6 is the future (it is supported by OpenNMS) but in my experience organizations are very slowly migrating from IPv4 (the word “glacier” comes to mind). Sometimes it takes a strong use case to justify the trouble and this presentation was an excellent case study for why to do it and the pitfalls.

Speaking of splitting out networks, the next presentation dealt with a similar situation. Presented by Andrew Ingram from High Tide Consulting, his session dealt with a company that acquired another company, then almost immediately spun it back out (video|slides). He was brought in to deal with the challenges of dealing with a partially combined network that needed to be separated in a very short amount of time with minimal downtime.

I sat next to Mr. Ingram for most of the conference and learned this was his first time presenting. I thought he did a great job. He sent me a note after the conference that he has “managed to get OpenNMS up and running in Azure with an NSG (Network Security Gateway) running in front for security and a Minion running on site. It all seams to be working very nicely”

Cool.

The following presentation would have to be my favorite of the day. Given by Sara Dickinson of Sinodun IT, it talked about ways to secure DNS traffic (video|slides).

The Internet wouldn’t work without DNS. It translates domain names into addresses, yet in most cases that traffic is sent in the clear. It’s metadata that can be an issue with respect to privacy. Do you think Google runs two of the most popular DNS servers out of the goodness of their heart? Nope, they can use that data to track what people are doing on the network. What’s worse is that every network provider on the path between you and your DNS server can see what you are doing. It is also an attack vector as well as a tool for censorship. DNS traffic can be “spoofed” to send users to the wrong server, and it can be blocked to prevent users from accessing specific sites.

To solve this, one answer is to encrypt that traffic, and Ms. Dickinson talked about a couple of options: DoT (DNS over TLS) and DoH (DNS over HTTPS).

The first one seems like such a no-brainer that I’m surprised it took me so long to deploy it. DoT encrypts the traffic between you and your DNS server. Now, you still have to trust your DNS provider, but this prevents passive surveillance of DNS traffic. I use a pfSense router at home and decided to set up DoT to the Quad9 servers. It was pretty simple. Of all of the major free DNS providers, Quad9 seems to have the strongest privacy policy.

The second protocol, DoH, is DNS straight from the browser. Instead of using a specific port, it can use an existing HTTPS connection. You can’t block it because if you do you’ll block all HTTPS traffic, and you can’t see the traffic separately from normal browsing. You still have to deal with privacy issues since that domain name has to be resolved somewhere and they will get header information, such as User-Agent, from the query, so there are tradeoffs.

While I learned a lot at UKNOF this has been the only thing I’ve actually implemented.

After a break we entered into the all too common “regulatory” section of the conference. Governments are adding more and more restrictions and requirements for network operators and these NOG meetings are often a good forum for talking about them.

Jonathan Langley from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) gave a talk on the Network and Information Systems Directive (NIS) (video|slides). NIS includes a number of requirements including things such as incident reporting. I thought it was interesting that NIS is an EU directive and the UK is leaving the EU, although it was stressed that NIS will apply post-Brexit. While there were a lot of regulations and procedures, it wasn’t as onerous as, say, TICSA in New Zealand.

This was followed by another regulatory presentation by Huw Saunders from The Office of Communications (Ofcom) (video|slides). This was fairly short and dealt primarily with Ofcom’s role in NIS.

Askar Sheibani presented an introduction to the UK Fibre Connectivity Forum (video|slides). This is a trade organization that wants to deploy fiber connectivity to every commercial and residential building in the country. My understanding is that it will help facilitate such deployments among the various stakeholders.

The next to the last presentation struck a cord with me. Given by David Johnston, it talked about the progress the community of Balquhidder in rural Scotland is making in deploying its own Internet infrastructure (video|slides). I live in rural North Carolina, USA, and even though the golf course community one mile from my house has 300 Mbps service from Spectrum, I’m stuck with an unreliable DSL connection from CenturyLink, which, when it works, is a little over 10 Mbps. Laws in North Carolina currently make it illegal for a municipality to provide broadband service to its citizens, but should that law get overturned I’ve thought about trying to spearhead some sort of grassroots service here. It was interesting to learn how they are doing it in rural Scotland.

The final presentation was funny. Given by Charlie Boisseau, it was about “Layer 0” or “The Dirty Layer” (video|slides). It covered how cable and fiber are deployed in the UK. The access chambers for conduit have covers that state the names of the organizations that own them, and with mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies those change (but the covers do not). While I was completely lost, the rest of the crowd had fun guessing the progression of one company to another. Anyone in the UK can deploy their own network infrastructure, but it isn’t exactly cheap, and the requirements were covered in the talk.

After the conference they served beer and snacks, and then I headed back to the hotel to get ready for my early morning flight home.

I had a lot of fun at UKNOF and look forward to returning some day. If you are a network provider in the UK it is worth it to attend. They hold two meetings a year, with one always being in London, so there is a good chance one will come near you at some point in time.

Last week I attended the 20th O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), held this year in Portland, Oregon.

This is the premiere open source conference in the US, if not the world, and it is rather well run. It is equal to if not better than a lot of proprietary technology conferences I’ve attended, perhaps because it is pretty much a proprietary software conference in itself. I found it a little ironic that the Wednesday morning keynotes started off with a short, grainy video clip where an open source geek shouts out “We’re starting a revolution!”.

I tried to find the source of that quote, and I thought it came from the documentary “Revolution OS“. That movie chronicles the early days of open source software in which the stated goal was to take back software from large companies like Microsoft. There is a famous quote by Eric S. Raymond where he replies to a person from Microsoft with the words “I’m your worst nightmare.” Microsoft is now a major sponsor of OSCON.

When I attended OSCON in 2014 I asked the question “Is Open Source Dead?” Obviously the open source development model has never been more alive, but I was thinking back to my early involvement with open source where the idea was to move control of software out of the hands of big companies like IBM and Microsoft and into the hands of the users. Back then the terms “open source” and “free software” were synonymous. It was obvious that open source operating systems, mainly Linux, would rule the world of servers, so the focus was on the desktop. No one in open source predicted the impact of mobile, and by extension, the “cloud”. Open source today is no more than a development model used mostly to help create proprietary software, usually provided as a subscription or a service over the network. I mean, it makes sense. Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon wouldn’t exist today if it wasn’t for Linux. If they had to pay a license to Microsoft or Sun (now Oracle) for every server they deployed their business models simply wouldn’t work, and the use of open source for building the infrastructure for applications simply makes sense.

Please note that I am not trying to make any sort of value judgement. I am still a big proponent of free software, and there are companies like Red Hat, OpenNMS and Nextcloud that try to honor the original intention of open source. All of us, open and proprietary, benefit from the large amount of quality open source software being created these days. But I do mourn the end of open source as I knew it. It used to be that open source software was published with “restrictive” licenses like the GPL, whereas now the trend is to move to “permissive” licenses like the MIT or Apache licenses. This allows for the commercialization of open source software, which in turn creates an incentive for large software companies to get involved.

This trend was seen throughout OSCON. The “diamond” sponsors were companies like IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and Google. The main buzzword was “Kubernetes” (or “K8s” if you’re one of the cool kids) which is an open source orchestration layer for managing containers. Almost all of the expo companies were cloud companies that either used open source software to provide a platform for their applications or to create open source agents that would feed back to their proprietary cloud back-end.

I attended my first OSCON in 2009 as a speaker, and I was a speaker for several years after that. My talks were always well-attended, but then for several years none of my paper submissions were accepted. I thought I had pissed off one or more of the organizers (it happens) but perhaps my thoughts on open source software had just become outdated.

I still like going to the conference, even though I no longer attempt to submit a talk. When I used to speak I found I spent most of my time on the Expo floor so now I just try to schedule other business during the week of OSCON and I get a free “Expo only” pass. You also get access to the keynotes, so I was sure to be in attendance as the conference officially started.

My favorite keynote was the first one, by Suz Hinton from Microsoft. She is known for doing live coding on the streaming platform Twitch, and she did a live demonstration for her keynote. She used an Arduino to control a light sensor and a servo. When she covered the sensor, the servo would move and “wave” at the OSCON audience. It was a little hard to fight the cognitive dissonance of a Microsoft employee using a Mac to program an open hardware device, but it was definitely entertaining.

My second favorite talk was by Camille Eddy. As interactions between computers and humans become more automated, a number of biases are starting to appear. Google image search had a problem where it would label pictures of black people as “gorillas”. An African-American researcher at MIT named Joy Buolamwini found that a robot recognized her better if she wore a white mask. Microsoft had an infamous experiment where it created a Twitter bot named “Tay” that within 24 hours was making racist posts. While not directly related to open source, a focus on an issue that affects the user community is very much in the vein of classic open source philosophy.

The other keynotes were from Huawei, IBM and Amazon (when you are a diamond sponsor you get a keynote) and they focused more on how those large software companies were using the open source development model to, well, offset the cost of development.

The Wednesday keynotes closed with Tim O’Reilly who talked about “Open Source and Open Standards in the Age of Cloud AI”. It kind of cemented the theme for me that open source had changed, and the idea is now much more about tools development and open APIs than in creating user-owned software.

The rest of my time was spent wandering the Expo floor. OSCON offers space to traditional open source projects which I usually refer to as the “Geek Ghetto”. This year it was split to be on either side of the main area, and I got to spend some time chatting with people from the Software Freedom Conservancy and the Document Foundation, among others.

I enjoyed the conference, even if it was a little bittersweet. Portland is a cool town and the people around OSCON are cool as well. If I can combine the trip with other business, expect to find me there next year, wandering the Expo floor.

One thing that all open source projects struggle with is getting users. Most people in IT and software are overwhelmed with a plethora of information and options, and matching the right material to the right audience is a non-trivial problem.

Last year my friend Chris suggested that I speak at a Network Operators Group (NOG) meeting, specifically AusNOG. It was a lot of fun. I felt very comfortable among this crowd. so I decided to reach out to more NOGs to see if they would be interested in learning about OpenNMS.

The thing I like the most about NOGs is that they value getting things done above all else. While “getting things done” is still important with the free and open source crowd, there seems to be more philosophy and tribalism at those shows. “Oh, that’s written in PHP, it must suck” etc. As a “freetard” I live for the philosophical and social justice aspects of the community, but from a business standpoint it doesn’t translate well into paying customers.

At NOGs the questions are way more business-focused. Does it work? Is it supported? What does it cost? While I’m admittedly biased toward OpenNMS and its open source nature, the main reason I keep promoting it is that it just makes solid business sense for many companies to use it instead of their current solution.

Plus, these folks are pretty smart and entertaining while dispensing solid advice and knowledge.

Anyway, with that preamble, at AusNOG I learned about the New Zeland NOG (NZNOG) and submitted a talk. It got accepted and I found myself in Queenstown.

The main conference was spread out over two days, and like AusNOG it consisted of 30 to 45 minute talks in one track.

While I know it won’t work for a lot of conferences, I really like the “one track” format. It exposes me to things I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise, and if there is something I am simply not interested in learning about I can use that time to catch up on work or participate in the hallway track.

The conference started with a presentation by the Honorable Clare Curran, a newly minted Member of Parliament (they recently held elections in New Zealand). I’m slowly seeing politicians getting more involved in information technology conferences, which I think is a good thing, and I can only hope it continues. She spoke about a number of issues the government is facing with respect to communications technology.

Several things bother me about the US government, but one big one is the lack of understanding of the importance of access to the Internet at broadband speeds. Curran stated that “lack of reliable high-speed network access is a new measure of poverty”. Later in the day John Greenhough spoke on New Zealand’s Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) project, where on one slide broadband was defined as 20Mbps download speed.

Where I live in the US I am lucky to get 10Mbps and many of my neighbors are worse off, yet the government is ceding more of the decision making process about where to build out new infrastructure to the telecommunications companies which have zero incentive to improve my service. It’s wonderful to see a government realize the benefits of a connected populace and to take steps to make it happen.

Because we all need Netflix, right? (grin)

There was a cool talk about how Netflix works, and I didn’t realize that they are working with communications providers to provide low-latency solutions distributed geographically. This is done by supplying providers with caching content servers so that customers can access Netflix content while minimizing the need for lots of traffic over expensive backhaul links.

I did find it cool that one of the bandwidth graphs presented was obviously done using RRDtool. I don’t know if they collected the data themselves or used something like OpenNMS, but I hope it was the latter.

With this push for ubiquitous network access comes other concerns. New Zealand has a law called TICSA that requires network providers to intercept and store network traffic data for use by law enforcement.

I thought the requirements were pretty onerous, but I was told that the NZ government did set aside some funds to help providers with deploying solutions for collecting and storing this data (but I doubt it can cover the whole cost, especially over time). The new OpenNMS Drift telemetry project might be able to help with this.

There were a couple of talks I had seen in some form at AusNOG. The ever entertaining Aftab Siddiqui talked about MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security) but unlike in Australia he was hard pressed to find good examples of violations. Part of that could be that New Zealand is much smaller than Australia, but I’m giving the NZ operators the credit for just doing a good job.

The Facebook folks were back to talk about their NetNORAD project. While I have a personal reluctance to deploy agents, there really isn’t a way to measure latency at the detail they want without them. I think it would be cool to be able to gather and manage the data created by this project under OpenNMS.

What I like most about these NOG meetings is that I always learn something cool, and this one was no different. Geoff Huston gave a humorous talk on DNSSEC and handling DNS-based DDoS attacks. While I was somewhat familiar with DNSSEC, I was unaware of the NSEC part of it.

Most DNS DDoS attacks work by asking for non-existent domains, and the overhead in processing them is what causes the denial of service. The domain name is usually randomly generated, such as jeff123@example.com, jeff234@example.com, etc. If the DNS server doesn’t have the domain in its cache, it will have to ask another DNS server, which in turn won’t have the domain as it doesn’t exist.

The NSEC part of DNSSEC, when responding to a non-existent domain request, will return the next valid domain. In the example above, if I ask for jeff123@example.com, the example.com DNS server can reply that the domain is invalid and, in addition, the next valid domain is www.example.com. If implemented correctly, the original DNS server should then never query for jeff234@example.com since it knows it, too, doesn’t exist.

Pretty nifty.

One talk I was eagerly awaiting was from Rada Stanic at Cisco. She also spoke at AusNOG but I had to leave early and missed it. While she disrespected SNMP a little more than I liked (grin), her talk was on implementing new telemetry-based monitoring protocols such as gRPC. OpenNMS Drift will add this functionality to the platform. Our experience so far is that the device vendor implementation of the telemetry protocols leaves something to be desired, but it does show promise.

It was nice being in New Zealand again, and our mascot Ulf seemed to be popular with the locals. Can’t imagine why.

I just wanted to put up a quick post on my trip to Linuxconf Australia (LCA) being held this week in Sydney.

First, a little background. I’ve been curtailing my participation in free and open source software conferences for the last couple of years. It’s not that I don’t like them, quite the opposite, but my travel is funded by The OpenNMS Group and we just don’t get many customers from those shows. A lot of people are into FOSS for the “free” (as in gratis) aspect.

Contrast that with telcos and network operators who tend to have the opposite viewpoint, if they aren’t spending a ton of money then they must be doing it wrong, and you can see why I’ve been spending more of my time focusing on that market.

Anyway, we have recently signed up a new partner in Australia to help us work with clients in the Pacific Rim countries called R-Group International, and I wanted to come out to Perth and do some training with their team. Chris Markovic, their Technical Director as well as being “mobius” on the OpenNMS chat server, suggested I come out the week after LCA, so I asked the LCA team if they had room on their program for me to talk about OpenNMS. They offered me a spot on their Sysadmin Miniconf day.

The conference is being held at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and I have to say the conference hall for the Sysadmin track was one of the coolest, ever.

The organizers grouped three presentations together dealing with monitoring: one on Icinga 2, one from Nagios and mine on OpenNMS. While I don’t know much about Icinga, I do know the people who maintain it and they are awesome. One might think OpenNMS would have an antagonistic relationship with other FOSS monitoring projects, but as long as they are pure FOSS (like Icinga and Zabbix) we tend to get along rather well. Plus I’m jealous that Icinga is used on the ISS.

I think my talk went well. I only had 15 minutes and for once I think I was a few seconds under that limit. While it wasn’t live-streamed it was up on YouTube very quicky, and you can watch it if you want.

I had to leave LCA to head to the New Zealand Network Operator’s Group (NZNOG) meeting, so I missed the main conference, but I am grateful the organizers gave me the opportunity to speak and I hope to return in the future.