On the 10th of November, NetMcr came once again took place upstairs at the 57 Thomas Street bar, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
Attendance was lighter than expected, mostly owing to a certain lurgi doing the rounds, but we were certainly weren’t in short supply of fresh faces; one attendee came all the way from Warwickshire, and we also still seem to be getting fresh faces from around the local area, which is excellent.
We were overjoyed to have our first presenter of the evening; long-time Manchester networking stalwart – yet first-time NetMcr attendee – Marek Isalski, Owner of Faelix.
Marek’s presentation, entitled ‘The Naughty Step’, went into fantastic detail regarding the home-grown system that Faelix use to make better use of all the raw intrusion data that is collected as part of routine network operations. Netflow, Fail2Ban, etc.
The presentation gave a great overview of just how useful all of this information can be, when put to proper use. We were treated to a number of end-user success stories (and a few gotchas!) that have really made a difference to Faelix’s response to security events happening on their network.
Many parts of Marek’s presentation also went into a bigger topic that was presented at the first Mikrotik User Meeting to happen in London, so we’re very grateful that we could see the brief version before the big event!
The last of two presentations for November was by Tom Hill, Network Manager at Bytemark, discussing the lacklustre percentage of IPv6 traffic being served towards ISPs with hundreds of thousands (even millions) of IPv6 subscribers, relative to that of larger content producers (e.g. Netflix, Google).
Because this was more of a lightning talk, Tom left us with the conclusion that as larger ISPs are now finally pushing IPv6 out to their subscribers en masse, the pressure has now shifted to be on those in Systems, Support & Development roles to enable AAAA records for their public-facing web presence.
We were done with presentations for the night, and for another month, but there was plenty to discuss over another pint (or two). We’d like to thank everyone that did manage to make it along, despite the biological hazards that seem to have been plaguing Manchester this past month. We’ll look forward to seeing everyone again on the 8th of December! 🙂
For those interested, here are the slides for the talks, in the order they were presented on the evening: