October 2012 archive

Oct 31

How To Participate in IETF 85 Remotely

IETF LogoNext week is the 85th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and, as we mentioned last week, there will be some IPv6 sessions at IETF85 we’ll be monitoring as well as many, many other meetings about various aspects of the Internet’s infrastructure.  There will be 1,200+ engineers from all over the world gathering in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, to listen, learn, discuss, argue… and generally make the Internet that much better by being part of those meetings.

But what if you can’t physically be there in Atlanta?  Can you still participate?

The answer is… yes!  The IETF provides multiple ways that you can listen in to the sessions and also provide your comments and feedback.  The basic steps are:

  • Find the sessions you want to participate in on the agenda.
  • Download the Internet Drafts and associated slides and other meeting materials.
  • Listen in via either a live audio stream or a live WebEx or MeetEcho session.
  • Provide comments/feedback via the Jabber chatroom for a working group, or via WebEx/MeetEcho.

Let’s take a look at each of those in a bit more detail.

1. Review the IETF 85 agenda

The first step is to look at the IETF85 agenda to figure out which of the many working groups you want to attend and what times those groups are meeting.  Atlanta is in the US Eastern time zone, and daylight savings time is ENDING on Sunday, November 4th.  Atlanta will be back to “standard” time of UTC-5. Check one of the many time sites online to be sure you have the correct time offset from your location.

The main IETF 85 meeting page will bring you to this agenda page:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/85/agenda.html

But I personally prefer the “tools-style” agenda found at:

http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/85/

My reason is that if you scroll down to the line for a working group, you have fast access to all the different ways in which you can participate in the working group.  For example:

From here you can download the Internet Drafts to be discussed in a working group, listen to the live audio stream, join the Jabber chat room and view the agenda.  I find the tools-style agenda an extremely useful way to join in to the various sessions.  I will note that the other datatracker.ietf.org agenda page will also let you download the drafts as a PDF file.

There are also excellent “IETFers” applications for iPad/iPhone and for Android that let you easily see the agenda and map out what sessions you want to attend from your mobile device.

One word of caution:

IETF agendas are always subject to change, including during a meeting.

Sessions occasionally get rearranged. Sometimes a session is cancelled. Things happen.  So just realize that you may want to be refreshing the page from time to time.

2. View working group agendas and download the drafts

Once you have identified the working group meetings in which you want to participate, you’ll want to look at the individual agendas and then download the associated Internet Drafts to review prior to the meeting. As noted above, the overall agenda pages provide a way to download a ZIP file or tarball that includes all the drafts to be discussed.  The individual agenda pages typically (but not always) provide links to the individual drafts.

3. Download slides and other meeting materials

As the meetings start, you will be able to download the slides that presenters are using from this URL:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/85/materials.html

Note: It is very common for presentations to NOT be listed there until right about the time the meeting is starting.  It depends, quite frankly, on how aggressively the working group chairs pursue their presenters and how responsive those presenters are to providing slides.  You may need to frequently refresh the page to see the latest materials.

4. Listen to the live audio streams

Every meeting room at IETF 85 will have a live audio stream coming out of it.  You can find the list of available streams at:

http://www.ietf.org/meeting/85/remote-participation.html

You should just be able to click on the stream and hear the participants as the meeting gets going.  The chairs and presenters will have microphones and then mics are scattered around the meeting rooms for participants to use.

5. Join the Jabber chat room(s)

If you want to provide any comments, or even just to get more information about what is going on, every working group has an associated Jabber/XMPP chat room.  Someone in the meeting room will volunteer as the “Jabber scribe” and will relay questions from the Jabber chat room to the meeting room using one of the microphones.  He or she will also usually provide notes in the chat room about what presentation is being discussed, who the speaker is, etc.

As noted above, the tools-style agenda makes it easy to join the Jabber chat room for a session.

If you are note familiar with using Jabber for IM, the IETF has a page about Jabber services. You will need to have a Jabber IM account with some service.  If you have a GMail account, that can work. There are thousands of other XMPP servers where you may be able to get an account.  You will also need some kind of Jabber client.  There are again, MANY Jabber clients available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and mobile platforms.  Some of the ones I personally have used include Adium (Mac), Miranda (Windows), Monal (iOS), Pidgin (all) and Psi (all). Apple’s built-in iChat (now called “Messages”) also supports Jabber.

Even if you don’t intend to comment – or even if you use other methods mentioned below – I still recommend joining in the Jabber chat rooms as they can provide a great way to understand what is going on in the actual meeting room and to reach someone who may be in the actual room.

6. Use WebEx or MeetEcho

As an alternative to listening to the audio stream, a few of the working groups have been using WebEx and a few more have been using a similar service called MeetEcho.  The advantage is that you have the presentation slides synchronized with the audio and also an integrated chat window.  The groups using WebEx can be found at:

http://www.ietf.org/meeting/85/remote-participation.html

That page also lists the groups using MeetEcho, but there is also a separate page focused on MeetEcho support at:

http://ietf85.conf.meetecho.com/

Use of WebEx or MeetEcho is something that individual working group chairs decide to use and so it is only available for some of the groups.

Final Notes

That’s really all there is to participating remotely: figuring out the agenda, downloading the meeting materials and drafts, listening to the live audio and participating in the Jabber chat room.

With those tools, you can effectively participate remotely in an IETF meeting.  You do, of course, miss out on all the hallway conversations that occur in the IETF meeting area.  You don’t get to join in the social event and you do miss out on the cookies. (An important part ;-) )  No, it’s not quite as good as being there, but it can work out well.

I’d also note that every working group has a corresponding mailing list, and much discussion happens on that list leading up to the meeting and after the meeting (and even sometimes during the meeting).  If you are interested in the activities of a given working group, you can find information about how to join the mailing list on the charter page for the specific working group.  (In the tools-style agenda, click on the name of the working group, then on the tab across the top for “Charters”.)

 

 

 

Oct 29

FIR #675 – 10/29/12 – For Immediate Release

Hurricane Sandy; two new interviews coming; Quick News: international social media use, Europe's business elite adopts social media, Apple's court-ordered apology, Twitter tests a like button; Ragan promo; News That Fits: the rise of the social media listening command center, Nestle's digital acceleration team monitors social media, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, Michael Netzley's Asia report, listener comments, how large companies are addressing the mobile revolution, TemboSocial promo, Dan York's report, Superman is now a blogger; music from Secret Skwirl; and more.

Oct 26

Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And Services

AmecheImagine you are driving fast along a major highway in traffic and you receive a call from a critical customer. She wants to know immediately when you can meet tomorrow with her team to go over the final proposal and sign the deal. There's no way for you to pull over and look at your calendar on your phone or computer... and it's really not safe in the high-speed traffic for you to be flipping through your calendar while you talk. What do you do?

Do you tell her you'll give her a call back when you get to a safe place? Or do you do the unsafe action of looking at your calendar on your phone?

What if there was a different way?

What if you could say something like "Let me check my calendar for tomorrow at 3pm" and then suddenly have a voice whisper back to you - on your call, but only heard by you - "your calendar is free at 3pm. You have meetings at 2 and 5."

You could then reply to your customer after just this brief pause letting her know that you could meet with her.

Sound like science fiction?

Perhaps... but that is the type of functionality that the team over at Voxeo Labs is looking to bring to calls with the launch of their new cloud service offering called Ameche. They are using the tagline "Apps in your Calls™" and produced this brief video to talk about what can be done:

I admit that I find their overview page and their introductory blog post a little bit over-the-top in terms of marketing-speak, but it starts to get interesting to me when you look at the page about apps in your calls. I'm not sure that I personally would get too excited about the "Social Calls Status Updates" example but it is extremely cool and valuable that they have this capability to connect with social networks. I find the other use cases such as Salesforce.com integration and context-based routing, and including the case I described at the beginning, far more compelling. It's also very important to note, as they do farther down that page, that Ameche is a platform and so can be used to build many different types of applications:

Ameche possibilities

That platform itself, described on the Ameche technology page, sounds quite intriguing. As I understand it, they are essentially deploying a virtual machine running Node.js into a carriers network and then deploying applications inside that VM. They provide this network diagram showing how the pieces can fit together:

Ameche technology

The outstanding part here is that they are using common web programming languages and fitting directly into existing carrier networks. This platform will let telcos create new services that can work with existing phone connections and existing phone numbers. No need for the customer to do anything except order the new service. No apps to download, no numbers to configure.

Obviously the primary market for this service is really the telecommunications service providers / carriers who are looking to offer additional services to their customers. At a time when those telcos are so threatened by the rise of various VoIP services and are looking for ways to build customer loyalty and keep the customers from leaving, Voxeo Labs' Ameche may just be the type of platform those carriers need right now.

Congrats to the team at Voxeo Labs on this launch - and I look forward to seeing what telcos will build with this new platform!

Full disclosure: I worked at Voxeo for 4 years and as a result am a small shareholder in the company. However, I would not write about the company or its products unless I thought they were worth writing about.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Oct 25

Four IPv6 Sessions Coming Up at IETF 85 in Atlanta

IETF LogoWhat’s happening with IPv6 at the 85th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) coming up in Atlanta November 4-9, 2012? Which working groups will be meeting?

As noted in our recently published “Internet Society’s Rough Guide to IETF 85′s Hot Topics” there are 4 working groups meeting at IETF 85 specifically on IPv6 issues:

  • v6ops (IPv6 Operations)
  • 6renum (IPv6 Site Renumbering)
  • 6man (IPv6 Maintenance)
  • sunset4 (Sunsetting IPv4)

Descriptions and links for each group are included below.  Given that IPv6 is the way forward for the Internet, you can expect IPv6-related topics to come up in working groups all across the IETF, but these four working groups are specifically focusing on aspects of IPv6.

(Text taken directly from the Internet Society’s Rough Guide to IETF 85)

v6ops (IPv6 Operations) WG

The v6ops WG continues to be active in describing operational considerations of IPv6 deployment. A couple of interesting drafts that are being discussed by the working group apply in particular to IPv6 on mobile networks:
Both have generated a lot of comment and it will be interesting to see how they proceed. There are also some proposed design guidelines for IPv6 and deployment guidelines for enterprises.
(8 November 2012, 1300-1500; 1510-1710)

6renum (IPv6 Site Renumbering) WG

The 6renum WG is chartered to perform an analysis of IPv6 site renumbering. If the analysis leads to conclusions that are also applicable to IPv4 that will be an advantage, but it is not an objective of the WG to make its outputs more widely available than IPv6. Similarly the WG is targeting enterprise networks, but the analysis may also be applicable to SOHO or other (e.g. ad-hoc) scenarios.
The working group has issued last calls on each of its 3 working group documents:
An iteration of the static problem draft has been made based on WGLC but as of today revisions have not been published on the other two. Presumably any final comments will be discussed on these documents.
Agenda: Not yet posted – check https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/85/agenda.html
(8 November 2012, 1730-1830)

6man (IPv6 Maintenance) WG

The 6man Working Group is charged with the maintenance, upkeep  and advancement of the IPv6 protocol specifications and addressing architecture, which is especially relevant as IPv6 begins to be deployed around the world at scale this year. Reflective of that, the 6man working group has 14 working group documents currently being considered. These are likely to be discussed in Vancouver, as well as some cross items with the 6lowmpan (v6 for low power networks) WG, which is not meeting at IETF 84.
(5 November 2012, 0900-1130)

sunset4 (Sunsetting IPv4) WG

sunset4 is a new working group in the Internet Area. In short the formation of the working group is an acknowledgement that the Internet is still largely IPv4, but in the presence of address exhaustion it cannot continue to be the Internet that we know today. The Internet will transition to IPv6 but there will be an interval where the Internet’s performance degrades as more coping mechanisms are adopted and before a complete transition to IPv6. This working group hopes to develop techniques to mitigate some of that pain. The immediate activity is to evaluate various CGN (carrier-grade NAT proposals) and determine whether there is a work item around CGN that functions as a suitable IPv4 sunsetting mechanism.
As a result of discussion at IETF 84, the gap analysis document has been made a working group document:
(5 November 2012, 15200-1720)

Oct 24

Walking In Red Square – Reflections Of A Child Of The 1970s

Dan moscow 1I was born in the late 1960's and grew up in the U.S. in the 70's and 80's when the Russians were the enemy. When the Soviet Union was the evil empire bent on the destruction of freedom, democracy and everything we held dear. When calling someone a "Russki" was an insult and when the news media routinely showed images of the Soviet military parades in Red Square. When we were sure that the Kremlin was sending spies into our country to steal all our secrets and would do whatever it could to destroy our lifestyle.

And when the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" meant that we didn't practice hiding under desks, as our parents might have, because we all knew that if the Soviets launched their missiles, we'd launch ours and the world as we knew it would end. (How many movies were made on this theme in the early 80s?)

Of course, the only "Russians" we really knew of were the evil villians of the James Bond movies and countless spy thrillers... or the state-sponsored "super athletes" that we saw in the Olympic Games and who we understood to be intent on showing how Communism was so much better and would triumph over Capitalism.

In many ways it was a much simpler world-view.

The Russians were the enemy.
Period.

Kremlin wallsI thought of all this tonight as I strolled along through Red Square taking photos. Drinking in the magnificent beauty of St. Basil's Cathedral. Taking photos of the walls of the Kremlin. Stopping to look at Lenin's Tomb.

How could I ever have even remotely imagined that I would someday be here?

Moscow... Red Square!

Unbelievable.

Granted, we were also the generation that watched as glasnost and perestroika took hold in the Soviet Union under the reins of Mikhail Gorbachev. We saw the Berlin Wall fall. We saw the opposition under Boris Yeltsin. We saw the Soviet Union dissolve and simply cease... to... exist. We saw multiple nations and economies emerge.

StbasilWe watched as the story we'd been telling and retelling for so long was shattered into a million shards... to be reborn anew into new stories of new nations... of a new worldview... of new threats... of new powers.

It's been 20 years now since Russia was reborn, and no sooner do you arrive than you immediately understand that this is a vibrant market economy full of energy and full of passion. I've had the privilege of spending the last two days in a room full of technologists and business people, of marketers and politicians ... all focused on how to make the Internet more capable within Russia and the surrounding countries. To make the Internet faster, better, safer, more secure, more powerful... and more open. It's been an outstanding event where I've both learned a great deal and met some truly remarkable people.

Yet still... I am a product of my childhood.

As I went for a morning run looping down through Red Square this morning... and then walked back there tonight... I could not help but be utterly amazed by how our world has changed. How different it is today from those decades ago.

Alas, I will not get to explore more. This was my typical business trip where I took a taxi from the airport to the hotel, spent two days inside a hotel and now will leave in a few hours to go back to the airport to fly home. My morning run and evening walk were the only times I got to see anything beyond the hotel walls.

But I have learned much from this visit - and would welcome the opportunity to return.

Perhaps there was no greater sign of the change in Russia... at least for those of us grew up in the 70's and 80's and can appreciate the exquisite irony... than this, an advertisement for the latest James Bond film, prominently displayed on the sidewalk in Moscow:

Jamesbond moscow

Our world has indeed changed. And this is a good thing.

Oct 23

Excellent whitepaper/tutorial from SURFnet on deploying DNSSEC-validating DNS servers

SURFnet whitepaper on deploying DNSSECHow do you get started with deploying DNSSEC-validating DNS servers on your network?  What kind of planning should you undertake?  What are the steps you need to go through?

The team over at SURFnet in the Netherlands recently released an excellent whitepaper that goes into the importance of setting up DNSSEC validation, the requirements for using validation, the planning process you should use, etc.

As we note on our resource page about the whitepaper, the document then walks through the specific steps for setting up DNSSEC validation in three of the common DNS resolvers:

  • BIND 9.x
  • Unbound
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012

For us to get DNSSEC widely available we need to have DNS resolvers on networks performing the actual validation of DNS queries using DNSSEC.  This guide is a great way to get started.

Have you enabled DNSSEC validation on your network?

Oct 23

Deploying DNSSEC: Validation on recursive caching name servers

SURFnet whitepaper on deploying DNSSECWhy should you deploy DNSSEC-validating DNS resolvers on your network?  What kind of planning should you do to prepare? What steps do you need to do?

The team at SURFnet has published a whitepaper titled “Deploying DNSSEC: Validation on recursive caching name servers” (PDF) that answers these specific questions and much more.  The document covers:

  • Cost and benefits of deploying DNSSEC
  • DNS architecture
  • Requirements before deployment
  • Planning your deployment
  • Operational requirements and practices

The document then gets into specific step-by-step instructions for three of the most common DNS resolvers:

  • BIND 9.x
  • Unbound
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012

For people looking to deploy DNSSEC-validation within their network, this guide provides an excellent way to get started.

Oct 23

DNSSEC Training: Men and Mice

Men & Mice has worked with the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), authors and maintains of the BIND DNS server, to provide training related to DNSSEC for several years at both conferences and in training centers all over the world. Their latest schedule of courses can be found at:

http://www.menandmice.com/training/

Men & Mice offers focused classes on DNSSEC and also includes DNSSEC as a component of other DNS-related classes. Men & Mice also provides IPv6 training classes.

The Internet Society Deploy360 Programme does not recommend or endorse any particular commercial providers of training. The information provided here is to assist people in finding training providers and is part of a larger effort to list all known providers of DNSSEC-related training. If you know of an additional training providers we should include, please contact us.

Oct 22

FIR #674 – 10/22/12 – For Immediate Release

New comment line; What The Plus book review is up; Mayo Clinic social media book is available; our GaggleAmp anniversary; Quick News: a new UK businiess podcast, changes to LinkedIn profiles, Gartner sees rise in fake reviews, Bodyform's sense of humor in responding to a consumer; Ragan promo; News That Fits: the rise of social mobile, Dan York's report, Media Monitoring Minute, UK refocuses online services, listener comments, TemboSocial promo, Newsweek's digital-only move and the demise of print; music from Wild Flag; and more.

Oct 19

“Migrating Apps To IPv6” Author And Editor Get To Meet Face-To-Face

A curious aspect of writing a book is that you never actually need to meet the people with whom you are working at a publisher. Everything can be done online with maybe an occasional phone call thrown in. Editors, production staff, publicists… all the interaction happens primarily through email.

It’s nice, though, when you do get a chance to put a face with a name. As shown below, I got a chance to catch up with Mike Loukides, the editor at O’Reilly who first approached me about the “Migrating Applications to IPv6” book project and who worked with me to make it happen:

York loukides

This was at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference back in the beginning of the year. (Excellent conferences, by the way!) I just stumbled upon the photo and thought I should post it. I still haven’t met the other editors and staff who helped me with the book, but that is indeed the way it works.