I am spending significant time this week in the train. First, I went to the EMANICS P2P workshop hosted by the University of Zurich. From Zurich, I took the train to Brussels in order to attend the EMANICS project review 2.0. While hopping from one EMANICS event to another, I learned that not having Internet is sometimes a real win in getting things done. And finding the right page in Korea can also save you the day.

About a year ago, I posted a note concerning the power consumption of the Internet and the need for a Green Internet. This note triggered some email exchanges and today I did attend a conference organized by some government organizations and BITCOM discussing the resource efficiency of information and communication technology.

While the energy consumption of data centers is usually associated with the energy usage of IT hardware (mainly server systems) and cooling systems, I found it interesting that some people reported a major impact of the software on the energy consumption. Of course, we all know that software has increased its “weight” constantly over the last years because time to market is more important in many cases than designs for efficiency and scalability. But as we move towards Green Software, we might have to rethink the way we do software development and get back to the proper design of truly efficient and scalable solutions.

I am organizing a Dagstuhl seminar Visualization and Monitoring of Network Traffic, scheduled for Spring 2009. Our main objective is to bring together visualization experts and computer network monitoring experts in order to exchange ideas how to better visualize what our networks are doing.

I have quite some experience with requirements discussions in the IETF and in particular with requirements discussions about network management data modeling languages and from my personal experience I can tell you that this is all a waste of time. These discussions will not bring us any closer to a decision about the direction. The only thing is that the list of requirements grows in each incarnation of this requirements collection process by some say 40 new requirements.

In December, I posted a revised version of the NMRG document defining SNMP trace formats, taking into account the comments received during the first NMRG last call. This document essentially passed the second NMRG last call and is ready to be further processed once some issues concerning the allocation of a suitable URI for an XML namespace have been solved. Today, I also posted the initial version of the document we started at the last NMRG meeting, asking the NMRG whether it is willing to pick it up as an NMRG work item.

The EMANICS project enters the third year, starting with a general assembly in Barcelona. I took a flight to Girona, which was OK although a bit early for my taste (leaving Bremen at 6:00). During the meeting, I had the opportunity to play extensively with an iphone - a truely incredible piece of technology. The user interface rocks!

I have been involved in the design of a new data modeling language for the NETCONF protocol (RFC 4741) called YANG. The work was driven by a small team of energetic people from Ericsson, Juniper, and tail-f and later some others joined. The work was largely driven by considering experiences from the SMIng effort (RFC 3780) and vendor specific solutions. In addition to the language design, the YANG team has been working on implementations to make sure the language is reasonably well defined and practically useful. For some examples, tutorials, or free code, see the Yang Central web site.

The 23rd meeting of the Network Management Research Group (NMRG) took place in Enschede on Thursday/Friday this week, hosted by the University of Twente. We managed to write up definitions for the analysis of SNMP traces. Our goal is to post an Internet-Draft once the definitions are getting somewhat complete and consistent.

The Handbook of Network and System Administration has just been published by Elsevier. This book is made up of chapters contributed by many people doing active research and engineering in this area. I have the pleasure to contribute a chapter introducing Internet management protocols (SNMP, NETCONF, SYSLOG, IPFIX) from an architectural perspective.

I accepted an invitation to join the editorial board of the Journal of Network and Systems Management (JNSM), published by Springer.