Network Management

Capacity planning or capacity management isn't just for networks anymore. In fact, while enterprise wide area networks (WANs) were once only optimized for transaction processing, it is now harder to find an enterprise WAN that hasn't been optimized in multiple ways to carry voice and video, Internet, and some mission-critical application that replaced a mainframe transaction system. With all of the new and interesting traffic types floating around in the WAN, it's a wonder anyone can keep things straight. Even Internet backbones, which should be application agnostic, are throttling certain applications to protect their own infrastructures. WAN capacity planning must evolve from an effort that network architects undertook alone into an effort that involves coordination among multiple infrastructure groups inside IT.

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Students expect their university’s network to meet their academic and personal needs. So how can network administrators cope with a student body whose network needs for self-expression, learning, and creativity outpace the requirements of academic departments or (institutional) business practices? Is it possible (or just wishful thinking) to predict their demands? During this session, we will identify a few trends seen on today’s information-communication-technology landscape and address why we must continuously seek alternative and more efficient ways to meet the ICT services of tomorrow’s students.

Regional and state networks increasingly take a leadership role in providing last-mile networking access essential for cutting-edge scholarship and research. Collaboration and peering among these networks has proven beneficial (for now), but what will be the long-term impact for our national networking needs, and how will it help America compete with Europe and Asia? Speakers will share their insights on the future of regional networks, including what they perceive as their unique technical and policy challenges, and what their role will be in meeting America’s future networking needs.

In 2004, at the request of student government, Bucknell implemented a cable television service over IP. We successfully addressed many issues, from testing to campus-wide rollout and later changes in set-top box technology and vendor-supplied middleware. Billing consumers and maintaining system security also taught us valuable lessons. In this poster session, we will share the hard-earned knowledge we've gained about how to implement such a system.

"Comcast's traffic-filtering efforts are the subject of FCC complaints and a lawsuit. At issue: ISPs right to control the flow of data over their networks"

"About a month ago, Google caused barely a ripple when it unveiled technology to filter out copyright violations on its YouTube video Web site. After all, YouTube had been under constant fire from big media companies for hosting unauthorized clips. But now a move by AT&T to adopt similar technology across its entire broadband network is raising the hackles of critics."

The higher education community faces increasingly difficult issues of security in a networked world, compounded by the demands of advanced applications. Performance requirements (high bandwidth, end-to-end transparency, new protocols) are essential for the academic mission and innovation, but are not easily accommodated in current approaches to network security. The Salsa group is forging new frontiers to address these issues.

Since its inception in 1997, this group has discussed a wide range of topics relevant to network managers including network convergence, bandwidth management, management systems, security, wireless technologies, and support. This gathering will allow network managers to share ideas about their current professional challenges and new or emerging technologies with other networking experts from a wide variety of institutional backgrounds.

Can too much security be a bad thing? Tighter Air Force policies are conflicting with the Air Force Academy's academic mission. While most colleges are tightening security, we are trying to relax ours. This talk will explain why this struggle will eventually occur at all educational institutions and how we have dealt with it.

"According to an Oct. 19 article by the Associated Press, Comcast has been actively degrading and
blocking BitTorrent traffic, amounting to "the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S.
Internet service provider." This is the latest and most clear cut incident illustrating the need for "network
neutrality" principles for the Internet. This factsheet provides a technological backgrounder on what
Comcast is blocking and how the company does it."