NONOG day

content/blog/wk9day2.md

@@ -1,7 +1,136 @@
 ---
-title: "Week 9, Tuesday:"
+title: "Week 9, Tuesday: NONOG-6/NIX in Oslo"
 date: 2024-09-24T21:55:00+02:00
-draft: true
 ---
 
 {{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/todo.png" alt="Credit: " >}}
+
+This morning I took a quick breakfast at the hotel and made the 1km walk through a light drizzle to
+the venue of the sixth Norwegian Network Operators Group meeting, organized together with the
+Norwegian Internet Exchange. I got there at 08:30 on the dot, and folks were starting to trickle in.
+
+It's an absolutely packed agenda with one track, which is great for me because it means I don't have
+to decide where to go. The venue is the [[Domus
+Biblioteca](https://www.uio.no/om/finn-fram/omrader/sentrum/se03/)] of the University of Oslo. On
+the square in front of the library I see a familar figure: Edvard Munch! Inside, out of the rain,
+registration is smooth and I get my badge for the day. NONOG has a set of stickers to signal
+specific interest or specific circles. I get a "This is my First NONOG" and "Presenter" stickers,
+and I add an "IPv6" sticker because, I hear we'll be rolling out IPv6 next year.
+
+I take my seat at the front of the room, and watch a bunch of pretty interesting talks: the first
+presentation is by Herman Loennechen about upcoming upgrades to 100G and 400G ports at NIX, and the
+importance of maintenance windows and BCP214 at internet exchanges. His colleague Kjetil Otter Olsen
+from the norwegian internet exchange NIX brings an update on the NIX future plans and services
+and regional activities. The message that stuck with me most is "we should understand what our
+community needs, and how the situation of internet and peering is in other parts of the country".
+
+Then, Ben Cartright-Cox discusses problems with BGP Hold Timers and his experiences drafting an RFC
+for BGP *Send* Hold timers, including a bit of a critical view on the transparency/opacity of the
+publication and editors process at IETF. After this, Markus Lyyra from Elisa in Finnland discusses
+a novell way his company used the wide collection of RAN base stations equipped with battery packs
+to help stabilize and balance the power grid, which was super interesting.
+
+The Norwegian toplevel domain is locked down and closed for reading. Not a problem for Alfred Arouna
+who presents reearch done with Ioana Livadariu and Mattijs Jonker on harvesting .no domain names from
+public data: a clever way to puzzle back together the contents using Certificate Transparency logs.
+Neat!
+
+Frode Fjermestad from Tampnet talks about monitoring and securing a fiber optic network [in the
+North Sea] using Distributed Accoustic Sensing (DAS) and State of Polarisation (SoP) sensing, which,
+considering the current state of global affairs, will prove to be a valuable technique to ensure
+subsea cables are not tampered with.
+
+Next, Arne Erik Berntzen from the Norwegian Postal services talks at NONOG in Oslo about the
+deployment of a new logistics building that skipped WiFi and went (private) mobile-core directly
+with 5G towers instead. He reports great success in the initial pilot building: from 80+ wifi radio
+antennas, to merely two (!) mobile radios for the private network and an additional two for the
+public telephony network.
+
+At lunch, I catch up with Ole who is in good spirits. We talk a bit about VPP and are joined by
+colleague Line and I also get to know Maja a little bit. Lunch is a set of sateh and wraps with
+veggies and quinoa. I can report that I made an absolute _mess_ of the lunch table, with quinoa
+splurting everywhere, quite possibly also on the ceiling. Sorry!
+
+After lunch, Kaj Kjellgren talks about scaling down time sync services for IoT devices using
+Roughtime, and a call to action to run multiple roughtime servers across Norway. He is joined by 
+Lars-Johan Liman of NETNOD talks about DNS Threat and Privacy Internet Research (TAPIR). I love how
+Lars-Johan calls himself "Dinosaur of DNS", it reminds me of Niels who also makes designations of
+such effect at NLNOG.
+
+We switch to a more societal / legal topic with Professor Olav Lysne discussing the challenges of
+protecting critical digital communication infrastructure and autonomy. This talk hits home for me
+because the Dutch are abandoning their own autonomy by moving some of their most critical
+infrastructure to american Hyperscalers [example: SIDN's misguided decision to move to AWS].
+
+I'm next! And I get to start 5min early, for some reason now mentally pacing my talk on running a
+backbone consisitng of VPP routers with only one IPv4 and IPv6 address to finish at 14:45 (which
+would make it 34 minutes, even though I was given 45min, whoops). I whirlwind through my storyline
+and finish "on time" (15 minutes early), and make some mental notes on how to iterate and improve
+the delivery. Thanks for being the premi&egrave;re, NONOG!
+
+J&oslash;rn O.Nilsen from Fiberworks talks about testing of optical equipment/cables before
+deploying and I cannot agree more. With 1G connections it's not such a huge deal, but 25G/100G/400G
+connections really really start to care about the cleanliness of the LC or MPO ferrules and cable
+tips. J&oslash;rn also shows a device that can do the tests including BER and optical levels /
+power dissipation, which is a nifty little find (see picture below).
+
+My buddy Antonios Chariton (now of the house of Cisco) discusses BGP and Stuck Routes - how
+problematic are they? It strongly reminds me of Jeroen's Ghost Route Hunter project at SixXS, where
+we also observed some implementations building phantom AS paths in the global routing table back in
+the early 2000s. And, we agree that Ben's proposed BGP SendHoldTimer may very well help these stuck
+routes. Takeaway: A few prefixes announced and retracted more than four months ago are *still
+visible* in the DFZ. Both Antonis and Ben have a concept of a _BGP Clock_ which periodically
+announces a beacon that can be traced through the DFZ. I like this idea!
+
+Back to a higher level contribution - Ulrich Wisser from ICANN gives a mindful talk about the NBU
+and the languages they speak (spoiler: not English!) called Universal Acceptance, at NONOG in Oslo,
+Norway. I never really realized it, but end to end e-mail delivery simply don't work in any locale
+other than ANSI, and even >3 characters gTLDs (like `.info`) fail to parse in many cases. Yikes!
+
+Olof Kasselstrand discusses service orchestration with Netbox; a super feature rich API and
+provisioning ecosystem, and I make a mental note to ask him about the module / plugin he wrote for
+NetBox. I wonder how many LOC it is, and if it's difficult to write this type of thing.
+
+We have one remote presenter, David Bianchi of Cisco joins us via video call and presents on routed
+optical networks - 400G with various transmission and WDM tech from Cisco. 
+
+The last presentation for the day goes all the way up the stack again to critical security process
+that are super relevant for my Google job - We listen to Bjørnar Simonsen from Orange discuss
+security topics within NIS2 and DORA. I've done several of these risk and maturity assessments for
+parts of Google as well, and I am fondly reminded of my buddy Jeffrey who knows all about risk
+mitigation strategy from NIST and MITRE ATT&CK. I had a lot of fun working on that together!
+
+The day comes to a close with a quick quiz by organizer Maja; who asks some silly and some content
+check questions. There are prizes at the end, but my participation is limited to randomly mashing
+buttons because I have a bit of visual impairment (migraine) setting on. However, after leaving the
+venue, on the street walking over to the evening dinner with Ben and Antonis, it very quickly
+clears.
+
+Dinner and drinks are offered by [[NETNOD](https://netnod.no/)] in an irish pub which is 45 meters
+away from our Hotel. Marina almost beats me there :) and she is very welcome to join - thank you for
+that! We spend the evening chatting with various groups of folks from the industry - I don't know
+many of them at the beginning of the day, but after this night out I think I may recognize quite a
+few of you on the streets of Oslo or Bergen or Stavanger or Zurich :)
+
+Back at the hotel, I'm suitably imbibed - it was a long but very intensive day with so much to learn
+and so many people to meet and get to know. Thanks, Eirik, Marius, Maja and Lars! Just before
+turning in, Niels informs me on Signal that the next Fusix podcast dropped - the one we recorded at
+the [[FrysIX Barbecue]({{< ref wk7day6.md >}})]. Marina says I can listen to it on the plane
+tomorrow, but I'm totally listening to it tonight before bed. It's a nice chat, and I really like
+how Randall retrofitted a Fusix podcast around this conversation. It's in Dutch, but if that's a
+language you speak, [[check it out](https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/de-fusix-podcast/id1706315138)].
+
+## Pictures of the Day
+
+{{< gallery-category >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-24/IMG_1553.JPG" caption="Norwegian Parliaments building in Oslo" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-24/IMG_1554.JPG" caption="The univerity square with on the far side, Domus library. NONOG and NIX have good taste in venues!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-24/IMG_1555.JPG" caption="On the university square I see this old friend: Edvard Munch" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-25/IMG_1580.JPG" caption="My NONOG badge this year, and I heard the 'my first time' was the most popular sticker!" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-24/IMG_1568.JPG" caption="The optical measurement device for AOC/DAC/QSFP-DD that was discussed. It's pretty neat" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-24/IMG_1570.JPG" caption="A selfie with the audience of my VPP talk at NONOG-6 in Oslo." >}}
+{{< /gallery-category >}}
+
+{{< gallery-modal >}}
+{{< gallery-script >}}
+