ACPE 2006 – Day 2

Being my first year attending the ACPE conference, I had no idea what to expect. Would the talks be riveting? Would I get some good food? Will I get a million emails from vendors now that my name is in a database? Since arriving at the Resort at the Mountain, (the location for this year’s conference) I’ve been completely blown away by the level of not only hospitality and fun, but also by the seminar material and speakers. I expect to get a few emails from vendors, but after the party they threw last night (and are throwing again tonight) they can email me all they want.

Some of the more notable seminars:

Jose Dominguez, Senior Network Engineer, UO Network Services
Derrick Lindsay, Mississippi State Department of Education

Jose went over some good information on packet shaping, with the focus being to analyze and understand your environment and create policies for waht you want things to look and act like before throwing dollars at the problem. He also gave some linkst to tools that I haven’t yet heard of but will be testing out in the near future:

http://www.switch.ch/tf-tant/floma/software.html

http://www.ntop.org/overview.html

http://software.uninett.no/stager/

http://www.splintered.net/sw/flow-tools/

http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/netview/

Derrick gave one of the best talks on business continuity I’ve ever attended. The source of real applicable knowledge for his organization came at an enormous cost however. Most of the information he gave was directly a result of lessons learned during the Rita and Katrina disasters. He talked about abstracting the “smarts” (as he referred to it) of the architecture to a switching cloud that can be routed, changed, and take a beating and keep on switching. He also had some really good advice for dealing with vendors and service providers: Ask them about their redundancy and continuity! All the redundancy money can buy will do your network no good if you can’t get beyond your telco’s equipment. Really great stuff.

http://www.mde.k12.ms.us/

I also sat down today and threw together a quick business card. I haven’t had one made, and I needed to be able to hand something to people when they ask me for a card. That sentence made no sense, but since I’m late for the party, it stays. Anyway, here’s the card if you simply must see it.