February was a slightly quieter month for NetMcr attendance, but despite the success of January spoiling us somewhat, we still had plenty of attendees to fill the chairs of 57 Thomas Street.
For the evening’s event, there were brace of presentations for February, and the first of those was given by returning speaker James Blessing.
James took us back to basics, with ‘IGP Choices 101’. From the history of IGPs, right through to the differences between IS-IS & OSPF, and why we seem to use them for different applications. There was even an overview of Dijkstra’s algorithm!
For a topic that normally invokes one or two flame wars, James managed to curate well-mannered debate on the subject that was – I suspect – of some benefit to us all.
Our second (and final) talk, given by Tim Bray, was entitled ‘IPv6 in Offices’. You might think this could be a relatively straightforward topic, but Tim’s talk explained – with recent real-world experiences – that this is anything but a solved problem, particularly with regards to upstream link resilience (such as ADSL failover).
I must say this was really quite an appropriate talk given the current work on BSkyB’s network, and a related/ongoing push from Enterprises to take note of IPv6 (even if uptake is slow today).
As has previously held true, Tim’s insightful talk gave us plenty to discuss throughout the rest of the evening. We’ll just have to hope he can keep thinking of topics to present on!
For those interested, here are the slides for the talks, in the order they were presented on the evening: