critique of NANOG meeting

Wed Jun 19 05:02:42 UTC 1996

Regarding our wonderful Mr. Metcalfe and his article at :

http://www.infoworld.com/pageone/opinions/metcalfe/metcalfe.htm

On again he has succeeded in generating a structured, well written 
article, that conjures up the image of a concerned parent shaking his 
head in dismay over a child that he had great expectations for.  Of 
course, if had even the vaguest idea of what had been going on at NANOG 
he might feel a bit differently.  

It was funny, I'll admit, when we found that the projector didn't put out 
enough lumens to drive the LCD panel, and I know that I chuckled when I 
learned that there was no packet loss anywhere ;)  

But hey, if you spend 14 hours a day *every* day dealing with building 
even a minor backbone like mine, I feel that you kind of earn the right 
to chuckle.  What Andrew, Curtis, Sean and the rest have earned, 
well, I don't want to inflate egos any more than they already are <grin>.  

Metcalfe feels that he was wrongly flamed for getting his facts wrong 
about who moderates NANOG.  That isn't the case at all.  He was flamed 
for being an ass and *printing* facts that were wrong.  Oh he cited a URL 
that maybe contained bad info.  And if we are not *real* engineers, well, 
how many *real* journalists don't verify their information with a couple 
of sources before they print it?  

Now don't get me wrong.  Bob is a *real* engineer in my book.  In fact, 
his article proves it.  His petty attention to the bad points of NANOG 
and his omission of all of the good things that came out of it, well 
isn't that just what he accused *us* of?  Oh sure Peter went off on a 
tangent during the DX.NET peering piece, but Peter *always* does this and 
we all would be worried if he didn't.   What Mr. Metcalfe missed was the 
upwards of 50 (my estimate only) direct BGP peering sessions that were 
arranged at the CAIS party that evening and opened on various NAPs the 
next Monday.  He also missed the fact the the RADB got updated and 
cleaned by an unprecedented number of ISPs (even if it is too much work 
for Sprint <grin>).  

In his years of "wearing a suit", I think Bob has forgotten that it is
ultimately the results that count.  We argue, whine, and moan, and it's 
amazing that the GW hall could hold all of the egos that were at NANOG, 
but after each event, how many bogus routes stop getting injected into 
the NAPs?  How many fragmented announcements get aggregated more 
efficiently?  Even the NIC listens and learns, Guardian is here (sort 
of).  And Bob *has* an Internet to write on and about.

Oh well.  I spent quite a while designing interfaces that used a 
technology that Bob basically invented from scratch, and I actually 
*learned* about Ethernet before uttering my first complaint (well maybe 
not entirely true).  Too bad he didn't pay NANOG (and the respective 
Internet backbones and NAPs) the same courtesy (I don't see him on the 
IAB).

-vjb