I am attending the Dagstuhl Seminar on the Management of the Future Internet and as some of you might know, I also love to create new terms when I go to this kind of events. (I somehow believe that for many hype terms, the words have been found before they were given an interpretation.) While sitting in the wine cellar, I heard my mouth suddenly saying “self-destructing networks” and so I started to think what this could possibly mean.
To understand the future of the Internet (or to better speculate about it), one should know something about the history of the Internet. There are two talks online which I highly recommend:
Especially young people who cannot imagine that there have been networks different than IEEE 802 and IP are encouraged to take a look at these videos (if you find them - it seems the recording of Leonard Kleinrock’s talk has disappeared from the Internet - which is kind of ironic if you know how he opened his talk - but good that I have a private copy).
I had enough talk lately about fairness, procedures, rules, and decisions in the context of a European project. It is amazing how much global heating in a project ecosystem can be generated in a very short time for relatively little value. Perhaps it is time to apply a “green project management” rule in future projects, restricting the heat emissions individuals can cause. Or we need to develop some project heat trading system; perhaps there are frosty project meetings in other places where some heat might be welcome.
The IETF week is over and one of the questions raised in one of my documents was as simple as this: What are the restrictions for valid domain names? Guess what, there is no simple answer. There are several RFCs stating some constraints on domain names and there is practical usage of domain names (not necessarily consistent with all relevant RFCs). It turns out that there is not a single specification that states all the restrictions under which valid domain names can be formed and the DNS directorate of the IETF is now helping to sort this out.
The AIMS (Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security) conference series has got its own web site. The site hosts the conference web pages and in addition has pointers to the summer schools organized by the same group of people who also steer the AIMS conference. AIMS 2009 is going to take place end of June beginning of July in Enschede, the Netherlands. Watch out for the call for papers.
The SNMP traffic measurements and trace exchange formats document has been posted as RFC 5345.
The SNMP context engineID discovery document has been posted as [RFC 5343] (http://dx.doi.org/10.17487/RFC5343).
I am currently at the 72nd IETF meeting in Dublin. There is a mailing list for all attendees (who sign up) to discuss meeting related issues. One of the threads on this list are dietary restrictions and the many combinations that exist among the participants and the challenges of finding appropriate food. After following some of the discussion, I am wondering whether the number of people with dietary restrictions at IETF meetings is larger than normal.
Network operators know that mistakes can happen. This is why it is good to have humans involved in network management control loops so that they can identify and resolve errors. This simple principle, unfortunately, does not seem to apply to many online systems. My recent example comes from a well known scientific publisher. A paper submitted to a network management journal ended up being registered in the publisher’s database as a submission for the Journal of Polymers and the Environment (yes, this really exists). Since then, the system periodically reminds the author to approve the publication and to transfer the copyright. (Of course, meanwhile the paper appeared in the correct journal and the copyright has already been transferred but the database has no clue about this.) The reminder email says the following:
This was a pretty busy week. We hosted an EMANICS project meeting, the AIMS 2008 conference, and a Future Internet workshop at Jacobs University. All went very well and I believe most people left the campus in a very positive mood and with some new friends. It is not yet decided where AIMS 2009 will take place but from the positive feedback we received it is already clear that there will be AIMS 2009 sometime June/July next year.