Yet another successful GPNOG event held at Little Tuscany Boutique Hotel, in Bryanston. The event was due to start at 6pm, but a lot of engineers managed to get there early (we not sure if it’s to try skip Bryanston traffic, or just for the excitement of the social networking at GPNOG that saw most people getting there early. We take it as the latter!).
First to talk was Ronald Bartels on his use of SoftEther for SD-WAN along with the security around Winbox and Mikrotiks on the internet. He talked around the 600 000 Mikrotiks with Winbox open on the internet and the importance around securing these devices using whitelisted IP’s to manage devices along with a neat Unimus platform, to do mass upgrades of firmware and audit for vulnerabilities and breaches. The SoftEther VPN platform supports all OS’ and has an excellent GUI, along with the VPN concentrator which does TCP mux to improve performance. Check out his presentation, which can be found on the ZANOG website for more information.
Next up, we had Waseem from Juniper (one of our sponsors for the event), speaking around automation within SP’s networks and an incredible tool (which supports all vendor equipment – not only Juniper) to help manage and plan your network. As more and more traffic shifts to the cloud, Service Providers face the challenges of increased demand, reduce costs along with ensuring a good quality of experience, to customers. NorthStar has two main components to it, the planner component, which gives SP’s the ability to do failure analysis, network modeling, inventory, network health, compliance assessments, scenario testing, forecasting and simulate node failures, amongst other things, and the controller component, which gives SP’s the granular visibility, flow management, network optimization, proactive monitoring, traffic management, path computation and topology discovery.
While engineers topped up their drinks and grabbed a bite to eat, Mark Elkins got his presentation ready to discuss a Video on Demand solution he’s working on for the African continent, call POSFLIX. While similar to Netflix, POSFLIX is a web proxy system with cached content, which is dnssec aware, multi-language and also has 2-step authentication, with the big driver behind it being a low cost video on demand/streaming subscription. At this point his content is only available from Teraco Isando, and while still in production, he hopes to get Service Providers onboard to sell these subscriptions as a value added service to home subscribers, all over Southern Africa and neighboring countries.
All presentations can be found on our website, and big shout out to all speakers for their involvement and time.
Overall, a great event, combined with lots of questions and participation and tech talk. Thank you to all that attended and we’re looking forward to the next GPNOG event in June!
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