Introduction and Welcome

• Keith Mitchell (UKNOF)

Room: Ballroom

Building a nationwide carrier for <$1M (Main Session)

• Tim Hoffman

Room: Ballroom From 2006 to 2010, Tim was a part of a small engineering team that built New Zealand’s 3rd nationwide telecommunications network, laying multiple thousands of kilometers of fibre and lighting up a DWDM transmission and MPLS telco network. They did this with 58 POPs on under $1M of routing equipment, while scaling to take a significant proportion of the internet traffic in the country. Requiring a fairly large amount of “creative engineering” and some Kiwi ingenuity, they’ll talk about how they managed to pull this off, some of the lessons learned, pitfalls, and hilarious stories involved in this achievement.

Implementing the GDPR (Main Session)

• Andrew Cormack (Jisc)

Room: Ballroom The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force on 25th May 2018, broadens both the definition of personal data and the obligations of organisations that process it. With regulators apparently planning to provide detailed guidance as late as December, this talk will look at the steps organisations should be taking now to be ready to implement that guidance when it appears.

Sponsor Presentation - ThousandEyes (Sponsor-led content)

• Nitin Nayer (ThousandEyes)

Room: Ballroom

UK Education: Skills gaps and recruitment (Main Session)

• Colin Smith (UTC Sheffield)

Room: Ballroom What is the biggest challenge in recruitment of good technical staff? What is being taught in schools and colleges and how is it delivered? Who decides what should be taught? How could things be done better? I don’t pretend to know all the answers, but I am an educator and I know how students learn and can show how technical education and relevant skills are being delivered and where the gaps are. GCSE ICT is gone, replaced by computer science. Sixth form colleges are switching to ‘T-levels’ and A-level computer science is already replacing ICT. It’s important because it’s not a closed loop, things can be done to make UK education more relevant to this ever changing and evolving industry, and I have a few ideas on how this can be done, from the local school to the government and the industry itsel

Panel: Skills gaps and recruitment

• Marek Isalski (Faelix Limited)
• Colin Smith (Utc sheffield OLP)
• Thomas Mangin (Exa Networks Limited)
• Matt Ingram-Smith (Benchmark Recruit)
• Hannah Pirie (Bytemark)
• Haroldo Jardim (Gamma)

Room: Ballroom

UKNOF Annual Update

• Keith Mitchell (UKNOF)

Room: Ballroom

IXP Route Server Prefix Validation at LINX - Progress and challenges (Main Session)

• Mo Shivji (LINX)

Room: Ballroom Earlier this year, LINX has started a project to implement prefix validation across the different Route Server platforms we are operating. This presentation will provide a very brief overview of what this is all about (why and how) and then focus on the implementation choices made and give an update on progress so far. It will provide an insight into the issues encountered, which will focus heavily on data validation and the quality of the data available in the IRR and other databases.

Empowering IXPs with SDN Capabilities (Main Session)

• Steve Uhlig (Queen Mary University of London)

Room: Ballroom While innovation in inter-domain routing has remained stagnant for over a decade, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are consolidating their role as economically advantageous interconnection points for reducing path latencies and exchanging ever increasing amounts of traffic. As such, IXPs appear as a natural place to foster network innovation and assess the benefits of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). In this talk, we give an overview of the work done within the Horizon 2020 project ENDEAVOUR, focused on SDN for IXPs. We will present use cases for SDN at IXPs, which leverage the superior vantage point of an IXP to introduce advanced features like load-balancing and DDoS mitigation. We will also shortly discuss how a SDN-enabled IXP can benefit its members but also operators. Finally, we will introduce an upcoming EPSRC-funded research project, called EARL, led by QMUL and the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with LINX, GEANT, ESN, Cisco, Corsa, that will leverage SDN-based measurements to improve network operations.

BIRD-Stack: Automatic BIRD configuration with StackStorm (Main Session)

• Diego Neto (NL-ix)

Room: Ballroom Presentation of BIRD-Stack, a StackStorm (event driven automation product by Brocade) based Open-Source framework to fully automate the BIRD route-server configuration, tailored for large IXPs. The framework allows to generate and automatically deploy feature-rich BIRD configuration files including support for members black/white listing and prefixes filtering based on IRR DB informations, fullbogons and DROP lists. During the presentation, as a practical use case and followup of the UNKNOF37 presentation about the 'NL-ix route-server configurator', we will also show the new features of the tool based on BIRD-Stack.

Detecting UK ISP Filtering (Main Session)

• G Llewellyn (Myself)

Room: Ballroom As one of the original developers of the OpenRightsGroup's blocked.org.uk platform I'd like to take a moment to explain how UK Internet filtering is detected and reported by civil liberties groups.

Segment Routing - Introductory Tutorial (Main Session)

• Adrian Farrel (Juniper Networks)

Room: Ballroom There has been a lot of noise about Segment Routing as the latest and greatest thing in networking, but as always a new technology is accompanied by loads of hype and it can be difficult to see beyond the marketing to understand what could reasonably be deployed in the near term and what the concrete benefits could be. This presentation will provide an overview tutorial to Segment Routing to introduce the concepts and the building blocks. It will highlight the limitations as well as the benefits of this forwarding paradigm and will describe some of the key use cases. The purpose is not to evangelise the technology, but to give a fair view of the pros and cons so that the audience can see beyond the marketing hype and determine the nuggets of value in this piece of IETF work. The presenter, Adrian Farrel, is a Distinguished Engineer with Juniper Networks, and an independent consultant specialising in the standardisation of routing protocols at Old Dog Consulting. He has been active in the IETF for 20 years and has held a number of management positions in that organisation. He is currently actively involved in the standardisation of Segment Routing as well as Service Function Chaining, traffic Engineering technologies, and the Path Computation Element.

Kolmo: configuration management primitives library & support infrastructure (Main Session)

• Bert Hubert (PowerDNS)

Room: Ballroom Routers and switches have long had the ability to serialise and commit their running configuration, leading to the easy ability to automate the deployment of known successful configurations. Software, including software based routers, does not frequently have this ability. This makes automated deployment a lot of work: a playbook populates a server, but there is no way to turn a well-tuned server into a playbook. Kolmo is an open source initiative to enable software to offer configuration serialisation compared to embedded default settings. This also allows for the porting of configuration files from one version to another, taking into account new or removed defaults. Kolmo also offers programmatic access (read/write) to configuration files, which is far superior to the 'add_line' or regular expression based configuration manipulation frequently used during automated deployment. Kolmo is a new development that will be presented as a ready to use proof of concept, but one that still requires a ton of feedback to become suitable to the network operator & wider communities. It is hoped that this presentation will facilitate such feedback. More information can be found [on GitHub](https://github.com/ahupowerdns/kolmo/blob/master/README.md).

Living in a van means Lean as a lifestyle (Lightning Talks)

• Tim Dobson (Formisimo)

Room: Ballroom Talk in a nutshell: - WHY?! * List item * found riskiest assumption * sought to test it as cheaply and quickly as possible * Built MLP * reflection: MLP was wrong MLP * How "Jobs To Be Done" can be used to help you figure out what you can outsource (cheap) & what you need to build (expensive) * eg washing machine in van = very expensive engineering challenge to test the hypothesis vs "I have a regular need for clean clothes" -> outsourcing to laundrette now a possibility. The slides will be mainly van based photos from [here][1]. For UKNOF, I might add some comments about my van-networking stack and mobile data, though it's painfully simple. :) [1]: http://instagram.com/tdobsonnet