Ramping up for Interop 2006
In Belmont California on the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, volunteers are testing and staging the network backbone for Interop 2006 in Las Vegas next month. Seen above are a group of engineers from several different organizations ranging from Juniper to University of Utah to Enterasys Networks are preparing a NAC (Network Access Control) lab.
The "Networld" portion of the name had been dropped and is now simply known as "Interop". The event which had formerly taken up the entire Las Vegas convention center plus parts of the parking lot in the glory days of the dotcom era is now steadily rebuilding itself and being hosted at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. I'll be giving a presentation on Wireless and Mobile security on Tuesday May 2 3:30-4:30 so if any one of my readers are attending Interop this year, drop by and say hello even if it's to give me an ear full on why I'm always wrong.
Mark Townsend of Enterasys shown here who is a fellow Engineer and Canon digital SLR aficionado was kind enough to loan me his flash attachment and his image-stabilized zoom lens which was used in these first two photos (flash wasn't used in first photo).
Mark Townsend and another volunteer are doing final touches.
I also met plenty of other interesting people at this staging event. Chris Hessing of University of Utah who is a network engineer is the lead programmer of Open1x which is an open source implementation of the 802.1x protocol that runs on Linux. Chris runs a massive Wireless LAN network on the Utah campus comprised of 1200 Access Points for some of the most demanding users in the world: students. Chris has a wide range of gear such as Cisco (Airespace), Aruba Networks, Symbol, and Trapeze Networks though it's mostly Trapeze and Aruba switched architecture though Chris personally favors Trapeze. The massive Wireless LAN will cover the entire campus and provide Wi-Fi access to everyone on campus including campus police and eventually Wi-Fi VoIP. I'll definitely be following up with Chris in the future and I look forward to what he and all the other volunteers have set up for the show. See you in Vegas Chris!