Vancouver Joint Techs (JT16) Summary

By Ben Chinowsky

The 16th Joint Techs Workshop (JT16), organized by CANARIE, ESCC and Internet2, and co-hosted by BCNET and the British Columbia Institute of Technology, took place July 17-21 at BCIT. Focus areas included:

• Network security for network engineers. There were three excellent how-to presentations in this area: Alan Whinery on Implementing VPNs With Clients You Already Paid For, Greg Travis on Use of Honeynet Technologies for Operational Incident Response, and Peter Van Epp on Using Archived Argus Flow Records to Secure and Troubleshoot Your Network (PDF). Chris Rapier gave an overview of his work on SSH for high-performance networking, and Doug Pearson presented a REN-ISAC update. Mark Poepping discussed EDDY (PDF), an ambitious project to create a "backplane" for diagnostic data. At a more general level, in the Security Policies panel, presenters from three different networks offered strikingly convergent security advice based on their experiences. There was also a concluding discussion on the relationship between security and network engineering, and how Joint Techs should address this. There was general agreement that, while Joint Techs should not attempt to compete with (for example) SANS, there is a great need for material on security from a network engineering perspective. Many of the organizations represented at Joint Techs don't even have dedicated security shops, and for those that do, more information on the network engineering side is crucial to working more effectively with the security people. See http://security.internet2.edu/ for information on Internet2's efforts in this area.
   
• Performance measurement. This was the focus of the first Tuesday morning session, which included a Passive Internet Analysis NOdeS (PIANOS) overview (PDF), a discussion of international Active Measurement Project (AMP) collaboration, an introduction to the pathdiag tool, which is built on Web100, and an E2Epi update featuring perfSONAR, the next version of piPES.
   
• Bringing next-generation networking technologies to the campus. A panel on Delivering Circuit Services to Researchers explored the issues involved, and a National LambdaRail tutorial presented NLR basics for campus network engineers. Herve Guy gave a demonstration of CANARIE's User Controlled Light Paths, and Per Hansen discussed optical network architectures at the the metro and regional scales, making the case for hybrid architectures in this context. Campus-level concerns with switched optical networking were also touched on in several of the Monday morning network updates, in particular those from BCNET and DOE UltraScience Net (PDF).
   
• Applications. Benoit Pirenne discussed networking issues for the the VENUS and NEPTUNE undersea observatories. Andrew Howard, presenting remotely from Australia, discussed intercontinental networking for moving large amounts of scientfic data and a demonstration of uncompressed high-definition video. A multicast BoF focused on the growing demand for multicast services to support TV over IP on campus; incoming Internet2 Multicast WG chair Alan Crosswell's notes from the session are available here.

Presentations from JT16 are available at http://events.internet2.edu/2005/JointTechs/Vancouver/agenda.cfm?event=238.