The IETF is slow. The IETF is too slow. We know that, no news here.

There was a discussion today about this topic in the OPS area meeting of the 99th IETF meeting, mostly driven by the fact that the networking industry (not just the IETF) is hit by a wave of YANG modules. Some ideas were presented to help organize this process. I personally do not think the IETF has a problem due to a lack of version numbers nor do I think the IETF has a real problem with format conversions of artefacts. There are many formats people use to produce content and to convert into the IETF blessed I-D format. What I personally find lacking is the following:

It seems the networking industry has created another hot buzzword: network slicing. The story, however, is more than 20+ years old. Telcos want to use their infrastructure (5G nowadays) to provide different services that are targeted to specific network use cases. Sounds good? Well, the telcos leave out that this is not done just to improve the network usage experience but to create new business models that allow to charge different amounts of money for the different network slices. I consider this technology created to support business models.

After joining Jacobs University, I ordered two computers in order to join PlanetLab, a truly innovative distributed computing and experimentation infrastructure at that time. The two computers become part of PlanetLab about 10 years ago and they recently asked to be retired. I think 10 years of service for mostly unknown researchers running even more unknown experiments is a great achievement and so I pulled the plug. I hope the silicon can enjoy the remaining time in the rack (with less heat) until it is time to make space available for others to come.

The IETF is meeting in Chicago this week and I am participating remotely via Meetecho. The remote participation service is improving every IETF it seems, saving me from a lot of long distance traveling hassle during the semester. While the people providing the remote participation service do a wonderful job, I believe a big part of this working well for me is that I know many of the regular contributors good enough from prior meetings I attended in person so that I can extract many soft signals just from the voice stream.

It appears that there are many motivators that instructors use to make students follow and even enjoy the material taught in computer networking courses. The really strong motivators seem to fall broadly into three categories:

• Competition and games between students or groups of students.
• Implementation of real-world protocols and systems where students build something that can be used (by them) afterwards (in principle).
• Trapping students into developing wrong solutions can be a tool to make them think critically and to make them realize the need to adopt a clear methodology.

The last one seems to be especially strong. I will try some more of these in the near future.

I am enjoying a Dagstuhl seminar on Using Networks to Teach About Networks where people talk about their experience with modern teaching methods such active learning, flipped classrooms, online learning, peer reviewing, and learning analytics when teaching computer networks. (Some people even talk about using blockchains to maintain student records.) And then there are of course discussions about what do we teach students and why and which tools people have found useful for student labs.

I heard some terms I did not knew before. A new one, for example, was sandwich classroom, i.e., a flipped classroom turning into a preparation phase, the classroom discussion phase, followed by a post studying phase (often using the same material used in the preparation phase).

The Flamingo project has been evaluated ’excellent’ four times. It was a great piece of teamwork to achieve this outstanding result. I enjoyed sitting in a review meeting today with the feeling that there is hardly anything that can go wrong. Lets see whether we manage to keep the Flamingo spirit alive.

Looking back, I think the highlights were the meetings where we discussed the research projects of our PhD students. The project meeting in Kloster Eberbach last year followed by a visit of DE-CIX was one such highlight. But I liked all the meetings where we had time for technical discussions and for getting to know each other better.

The last report for the Flamingo project has been submitted today. The final project review will take place next week and hence it is getting time to say bye bye to the Flamingo project. I truly enjoyed the four years of the Flamingo project.

About 10 years ago, we became Jacobs University Bremen and as a consequence of the name change we had to transition DNS names from eecs.iu-bremen.de to eecs.jacobs-university.de. In order to not break things unnecessarily, we kept serving the eecs.iu-bremen.de zone but now the time has come to shut it down. We received DNS queries for eecs.iu-bremen.de after turning it off for a while but after some weeks queries for the retired zone seem to stop.

I have always been a fan of static web pages. When I started to think about a personal web page in 2005, I ended up using NanoBlogger as my content management system since it allowed me to write blog posts in a terminal (over ssh) using my favorite text editor, it did not require much on the server side, and it was a rather cool shell script hack. The world moved on since 2005 and content management systems became really big and also quite usable (I can edit content on them easily even without my most loved browser plugin It’s All text! that allows me to edit HTML textboxes in my favorite text editor).