SANOG VIII Draws Closer

As we gather for the first ever SANOG event – SANOG VIII – in Pakistan, a number of thoughts come to the mind of those attending the event from the local industry. Is this another ‘IT event’ similar to those that are held throughout the year in expo centers where ear-deafening music is played and life-large LCD and plasma displays show movies and music videos that have no relevance to IT and Networking? Candidly speaking, in these events, knowledge-transfer is the name of collecting (literally) kilograms of glossy brochures that are only good for fanning yourself some much needed air when the electricity utility company tries to take you back to dark ages. And of course, you can make a few friends and win a couple of dialup Internet hours.

SANOG provides a forum that is based on knowledge-transfer, learning and exchanging information with like-minded and counterparts from our very own region. As the program continues for the planned 9 days, participants would see a number of formats each with its unique benefits and advantages. The workshops (on Network Security, Routing and DNS) provide hands-on training and touring experience to the participants. The tutorials, presented by industry experts, often those who have written or contributed to Internet standards (called RFCs and Drafts) once again provide excellent exposure to the relevant areas and a chance to interact with the tutors. The conference provides a social gathering where one can meet with and build contacts for future interaction with counterparts from the region. This provides for a fantastic uptake of projects and initiatives that are based on mutual co-operations.

Talking more about the topics and discussion domains that are being taken up in this event, I would like to briefly take you on a tour of why each of the stuff being discussed here is unusually important to us – here in Pakistan.

As more and more backbones land into Pakistan – on different physical medias both from the shore of Karachi and those from Europe/Turkey and India, service providers in Pakistan will have an irresistible temptation to ‘go multi-home’. Interconnections between major service providers in Pakistan remains what I prefer to call ‘exercise early in the morning’ – you know its good for you but you don’t do it. Hopefully, when interactions such as SANOG VIII will result first in social and then physical networking of service providers of Pakistan, inter-operator routing will come up as a significant practice area where we will need knowledgeable staff in abundance. As you can see, this is one of the topics of the workshops taking place at SANOG VIII.

There is a serious dearth of IPv4 addresses on the Internet today. As broadband deployment gets underway in Pakistan, more and more IPv4 addresses would be required to provide end-to-end connectivity for the people who use this network. Limited IPv4 addresses availability asks for various forms of Network Address Translations and Port Address Translations gymnastics that are not easy to implement, are often non-standard and result in broken end-to-end connectivity. Given the fact that we might have to live with IPv4 for a considerable time to come, it is important that these network concepts are clearly understood and tackled accordingly. For example, providing security and voice over a ‘NAT-ridden’ network is a big challenge with intricacies of their own.

This brings us to the topic of IPv6. IPv6 promises, among many other things, end-to-end connectivity between communicating users. This end-to-end connectivity is far more capable than the NAT/PAT based connectivity that has several show-stopping short-comings. It is imperative that the engineer and design staff engaged in the networking domain of local organizations not only understands the true importance of IPv6 adoption but are actually an advocates of this transition from IPv4 to IPv6. From an optimistic view point, Pakistan stands a very good chance of adopting IPv6 early-on as the country is yet to see a mass-scale broadband deployment.

It is a known fact that mass adoption of broadband Internet and electronic consumer-based commerce go hand-in-hand with each one complimenting and proving catalytic to the expansion of other. Consumer-based ecommerce cannot and will not flourish unless standards-based privacy, credibility is offered to the end-users as a base offering. Knowledge, technical know-how and philosophy of electronic commerce, its benefits, its pitfalls and social impacts all need to be understood not only by the engineers and technicians that run the show in the local industry but also by the masses. Networking service providers in the local industry also need to take a conscious-driven approach in offering solutions to the local industry customers. As many industry insiders would readily testify, current solutions offered to the industry by Internet and network service providers are often based on false notions of security and often without a clue of basic services that should be provided to the enterprise user. This can only happen when standards and best practices win the hearts of the engineers and solutions designer that go out to the market and offer their services.

SANOG VIII should also go a long way in igniting the spark of ‘interaction-with-a-purpose’ within the local technology practitioners. The numerous marketing and promotional events that Pakistan has been witnessing in the recent years must have been helpful in their respective goals but to date, we have not seen any assembly of the community that has defined purposes of knowledge transfer, information sharing and interaction building. One of the success of SANOG VIII would be a continuous and almost institutionalization of ‘networking of the networkers’.

Such social networking of the people involved in the technological domains of the local industry will result in things that have been felt necessary for a long time but are yet to see the light of the day. Thinking off the head, a number of such projects come to mind – such as neutral Internet Exchanges, community driven local content hosting services, identity management etc. These are not new concepts; rather we have been hearing about them for a long time now. However, the expected social networking between the local technologists should result in these dreams and wishes coming true for the benefit of all.

No discussion of contemporary Internet is complete without the mention of the menace of Spam. Defined as commercial, unsolicited bulk email, Spam is one of the core problems of today’s Internet and has far-reaching technical and social effects. Since this problem has its root in the various design bugs that the early Internet was born with, a complete technical solution for it remains a distant promise. The other course, then, that is left for the industry to follow is to tackle the problem at the social level. Effective legislation, vigilant reporting systems, informed end-users and responsible industry behavior are some of the strong armaments against this evil. The audience might be surprised to know that for a long time, a number of Internet Service Providers in Pakistan actually survived by knowingly providing safe-heavens to spammers from North America on their machines and transit bandwidth. The amount of ‘bad press’ Pakistan attracted due to such acts is still a part of the Internet archives for anyone to witness. A collective effort – from strong technical anti-spam measures taken up by Internet service providers to responsible behavior by the marketing industry to zero-spam-tolerance attitude by end users can make a big difference.