Conferences

One day I will go to a conference as an attendee. I will not organise. I will not present. I will not schmooze customers. I will not solve deep network design issues in the foyer. I will not attend hallway meetings. I will not do secret deals to improve the stability of the net. I will not be up late sweeping the floor rather than partying at the nightclub. I will receive schwag rather than disburse it. I will attend presentations, not be making that demo work from behind the curtain.

Putting that dream on hold, it looks like I'd be giving an end-to-end network performance workshop at QUESTnet 2008. Followed by a long presentation on how to make BGP, firewalls and OSPF all work happily together so that they all dynamically route and fail over in a reasonable way.

The workshop should be good value, we'll hammer routers, firewalls and computers until their pips squeak. Last time I did something like this one of the PCs caught fire and we broke a router so bad its FPGAs had to be reloaded from its JTAG bus.

If you are a vendor and think your equipment is better than those then drop me a line -- workshops are a good opportunity for non-dominant vendors to get their gear looked over by decision-influencing people. If you have a solid firewall that actually does 1Gbps or a switch with fair packet loss then this would be a good opportunity to spread the word.