Having taken a year of absence due to the APRICOT conference in Auckland last year, the New Zealand Network Operators Group conference returned to its regular time at the end of January. This year, it was held overlooking Tauranga harbour.
The two-day conference started with a wireless theme. Jonathan Brewer managed to include space lasers and multiple Trumpian jokes while covering the state of the art in satellite Internet. He was followed by Peter Gent about managing the spectrum and Murray Pearson’s experience of building Lightwire’s rural infrastructure.
The first day’s keynote was Tim Hoffman, local boy made good at Twitter. He covered the evolution of Twitter’s network, describing networking on a scale not seen in New Zealand.
After lunch, Peter Ensor spoke on the core architecture of the Ultra Fast Broadband project, the Gigabit Passive Optical Network, and Vikram Kumara from Kotahi Net spoke on their objective to provide national LoraWAN coverage. The day ended with measurement presentations by Matthew Luckie on the Spoofer project, Shane Alcock on unusual port 80 traffic, and Sebastian Castro who is mapping Internet topology using RIPE Atlas data.
View videos of all day one presentations
The second day opened with a quick discussion of the National Library harvest of .nz web content and lightning talks. Half the lightning talk slot was taken by Brad Cowie’s review of the custom SDN network built for the conference using the Faucet controller. The conference had provided valuable production experience for the Faucet team and so this year’s NZNOG has progressed Internet technology more directly than usual.
Geoff Huston gave his usual excellent talk, this time persuading us that we are all idiots for trusting the DNS when using Internet banking.
Tim Hoffman came back and analyzed the performance of NZ’s three IX providers based on his international experience and was not as abusive as many expected. The IX’s had the right of reply and it seems that competition is going to improve the breed.
The conference’s final session covered various security related topics including an introduction to the newly established CERT NZ and the operation of the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act (TICSA) and FastNetMon – a new tool for analyzing DDoS load.
View videos of all day two presentations
The successful return of NZNOG bodes well for next year although no decision on location has been made yet. The NZNOG trustees would like to acknowledge all our sponsors, particularly the Platinum sponsor, GoWifi, and the support of Internet NZ.
Richard Nelson is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the University of Waikato.
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