Trip Report -- Interop Oct. '97



Tuesday

Arrived, took the MARTA to Peachtree Center and walked to the hotel and got checked in. After checking email, finding out that Dave wasn't coming and that Mark would be in around 2 or 3 in the morning, I headed out to get some dinner. Wandering back along Peachtree St. I stopped at a Mexican sit-down chain and ate at the bar to avoid waiting in line. Afterwards I headed back to the hotel to catch a movie on TNT and get some sleep.

Wednesday

After waking Mark up at 9 calling from the front desk to see if he needed my spare "get in free" ticket, I headed up to the World Congress center about 9:30 to be ready for the show floor to open at 10. With the extensive list of things to bring back information about, I took a 'shopping' approach to the show floor -- I just walked up and down the aisles trying to spot anything that might be on my list. This yielded a fairly good return, and I did manage to stop by a lot of interesting places. In the interest of saving my back, I asked most vendors to send me the information via mail. I started in the West side which was a mix of large vendors and small (unlike the '95 show). Some of the highlights were Cisco, where I spoke with Marcus Phipps about the buffering on the new 48-port 10M switch card for the catalyst 5x00 series, as well as the ATM card for the catalyst3000. He seemed to think that we should be able to use the ATM card, and that what we thought we had to set up was a common misconception. He didn't have any business cards, so I didn't get his email address, but we should talk to Mike Ryan about his comments. I saw a number of SNMP packages of all sizes, one that stood out was Caravelle, since they support both Mac and Windows for simple monitoring of devices. Since what we're looking for for net admins should be fairly simple, I brought back information on this. Most products were for Windows NT/95 only, but I got info on those as well, since a number of net admins do have access to those platforms. I saw a few of the many ATM sniffers I ended up seeing, and it was nice to see that people other than Net. Gen. had nice looking products. A number of wireless vendors were in this area, and most of them had demos set up, the Wireless Coffee bar was amusing -- you ordered you coffee on a wireless connected laptop, and someone brought it to your table. Most of the wireless systems were similar: either PCMCIA cards or small units that attach to the lid of the laptop so that the antennas are slightly higher. They all require an 'access point' unit which is attached to the Ethernet. I should be getting more technical information from most of the vendors in the mail, but they were all talking about 2.4 Mbs connections, over a few hundred feet, which is pretty good and would work in a classroom or cubicle area. I spoke to one Gigabit vendor, who said that it was mostly good for high-end workgroups, but that they weren't suggesting it for much else. Another interesting product was an MPEG-2 to ATM encoder/decoder. Their box can encode one MPEG-2 stream and decode up to 3 coming in off the ATM. It's designed for video conferencing and distance learning. The scheduling software was fairly straight forward, and looked easy to set up for a limited number of users (up to a few hundred, as each one must be created by hand it seemed). I got together with Mark about 4, and went back to look at one of the ATM analyzers, then headed back to the hotel to drop our stuff off before going to the HP Educational dinner event. Hitachi had a nice 24 port 10/100 autosensing box with an ATM uplink that looked feature rich. It does all the protocols we need for ATM, it looks like it might be a good 10/100 workgroup box.

Mark and I headed to the Omni Hotel for HP's dinner and educational evening. We met a number of HP employees and talked about ATM Analyzers, and other things networking. After a while Steve Wallace, the Director of Network Operations for Indiana University gave a short talk on what they were doing with their network. They decided not to use vlans, instead they have a separate switch for each subnet in a building. They've replaced their David Systems repeaters with HP switches (and repeaters?). They are moving away from a purely routed environment however, but they are doing so by having multiple subnets assigned to one interface on a router -- this way the staff don't have to renumber (they can't force them to change their addresses, and are trying to do this in a low-impact manner). It was an interesting perspective and rational. They're also working on some software to discover the topology of the network using the layer two information that the software can get from bridges and switches forwarding tables. I suggested when it was done they could see if it could handle a net the size of ours, and that he should come visit some time and see how well vlans work for us. After Steve spoke we chatted with him for a while, and then got into a discussion about wiring and standards with some people, mostly from HP. One of the HP employees was Pat Thaler, and she has served on a number of the 802.3 committees. She told us a little about the auto sensing standard for 100Base-TX and the issues with 100base-T2.

Thursday

We headed to the World Congress Center about 9:30 and to kill time until the show floor opened, I stopped in the bookstore. There are more ATM networking books out than I had guessed, but I found one that looked like a good introduction, and another that had some interesting modeling information. I also saw the new ATM and ADSL 'cheat sheets' by DigiNet. I got the ATM intro book and some sheets, and headed for the show floor. I hoped to finish the west side by noon and so started up where I'd left off Wednesday. As on Wednesday, there were lots of interesting things to see. I made it by Network General and saw their ATM analyzer, as well as another company that had a VME-bus based system that ran solaris for remote access to the analyzer. I started seeing a lot more mini-100M hubs, and picked up info on those as well as asking for data to be sent. At 12 I headed for the 'Gigabit Face-off' unfortunately it was more of a vendor-vs vendor event than a general information event. There were good questions, but they were almost all product or product-line specific. There wasn't much in the way of ATM vs Gigabit or even "what does gigabit do well" just product bragging and bashing. I left there at 1 and went to meet Mark for lunch. After lunch I went back to the trade show, starting in on the East side. More 100M equipment was the big feature. I talked to Cabletron and saw the 2200 switch, and it looks much better than the equipment we had in before. He even said that they didn't like the SEHi hubs any more than we did. He's supposed to talk to someone in Chicago and see if we can straighten out the problems we've been having. I met up with Mark to check email at 4, then headed to Selsius Systems to check out the Ethernet Phones, which were pretty interesting. Take a look at <http://www.selsius.com> but basically they have an Ethernet jack, and use DHCP to get their address. The phones and server will be ready to test with in November, and the link to the PSTN will be ready in January. Then we headed back to the bookstore where I got the other ATM book and more of the info sheets, and the show was over.

After going back to the hotel and resting for a while, I got together with Mark, having convinced him to try the Indian place that I'd been to in '95, and headed there. It was only a 2 block walk, and we were soon there and seated. Then the fun began -- about 15 minutes later the found menus for us, and then about 5 or 10 minutes later came back for our order. When the food came 2 out of 4 items were there, the others were wrong or missing, and our server never reappeared with the promised Naan. We finally stopped someone else, and they got the manager. They never found our food. What we got was good, just not exactly what we ordered. The manager knocked about $10 of the price of what we had gotten, and it looked like his night was getting progressively worse. We then headed back to the hotel for ER and some sleep.

Friday

We headed back at 9:30 and since one of the people we'd talked to at the HP dinner was going to be at the HP booth, we headed there first, and saw their rather interesting ATM analyzer. This one is different than most of the others in design being a bit more compact, yet still having separate processors for the ATM decoding and analyzing. The unit is a WAN unit that can also do V.35 and RS-232 debugging, as well as having an optional T-1 module. There is an add-on box that can do 10/100M Ethernet as well. Here we also stopped at a number of Gigabit vendors and talked about products and where they could be applied. Most vendors are promising free hardware exchanges if their products don't meet the final Gigabit standard, which is nice. It was also apparent that no one was doing 1000M copper. 10/100 copper ports with 1000M uplinks were fairly common though, and 10k distances over singlemode were common as well. There were two point-to-point wireless vendors on the East side that I hadn't seen yet, one with an interesting looking laser based system. The Wireless Consortium was also over in the East side, and I got some interesting interoperability information from them. No one seems to be looking into doing 802.11, but everyone is buying the same chip-set so they are all interoperating. Nearly all the wireless point-to-multi-point systems support roaming -- if you want from the cell covered by one Access point (the Ethernet connected box) into another cell, you keep your connections. A quick lunch at the Pizzahut express and then off to do a last sweep. We finally found the Paketeer "push back" people (I had the wrong booth number off of the map) and talked with them about their traffic shaping product. It actually gets in the middle of a TCP session and talks to both ends, negotiating the window sizes to keep the total throughput down. We tried to win a PalmPilot for Daver, but neither of our names got drawn out of the bowl. With the show closing at 4, we had about an hour to kill and by this time I was pretty much out of questions to ask, and we went to the big vendors to ask about 100baseT2 since we hadn't seen anything on it. The folks at the Cisco booth hadn't heard of it, but sounded interested. The switch product manager at 3Com knew about it but didn't think anyone was working on it. He was going to check, but he didn't seem too interested. We swung by the bookstore to be sure that they hadn't increased the 10% discount for the end of the show (they hadn't), and called it a day.

Heading back to the hotel for a break and some computer games was in order. Then off to dinner at the brick-oven pizza place, which had both good food and excellent service as I had recalled. Then a few more computer games before calling it an evening.

Saturday

Pretty much all I did was homework. I packed my info from the show and Mark drove it home so I didn't have to carry it on the plane. I took a break to give the Indian place another try for lunch -- they only had a buffet, and it was okay but not great (any one know how to get bright yellow curry stains out of jeans?). Then back for some more studying. For dinner I headed back to the pizza place, and tried the clam pizza, which was quite excelent with lots of garlic and hot peppers baked in, and a bit of lemon juice on top. I headed back to the hotel and did a few more problems while watching South Park, checked my email one last time and called it a night.

Sunday

I got up, packed and checked out at 9. Then I walked back to Peachtree Center for the last time and caught the MARTA back to the airport, for an uneventful trip home.
17 October 1997, Debbie Fligor