Recently in Seminars Category

It is Wednesday which is day 2 for our class here at the Penn Stater. In the morning we continued the general survey of tools that can help us get the job done. I realized that after I got to about 20 links in two chapters, it was time for Del.icio.us tags. To see the links on delicious look for the following tag: psult433. The "l" is a lowercase "L".

This afternoon we finally got into the doing of some security tools. After years of tinkering, I am finally starting to understand how Linux and UNIX work internally. It's relatively simple, but that is the double-edged sword. All those plain text configurations give me a headache. It's definitely time for bed.

I am spending this week at the Penn Stater taking a SOS for subsidizing the training. $250 for a Learning Tree class is a steal. So Day 1 as you might expect included introductions and the first couple of chapters. I have already learned about a few tools that I need to look up. Tripwire, Bastille, and some introductory cryptography material. For old school *nix admins, these tools might be old hat, but I am an old school Windows guy who is still relatively new to Linux. As with all classes like this one, I realize how far we have to go for our own security of VoIP systems. Rome wasn't built in a day, but we have a lot of work to do. Job security anyone?

A news story from a couple months ago, has been settled at least from the perspective of Creative Commons. Lawrence Lessig's blog has the update on the removal of Creative Commons from the lawsuit by the plaintiff. See below. This is a great bit of news as the Creative Commons is an incredibly important piece of adapting intellectual property licensing to the technologies available today.

From the Why-a-GC-from-Cravath-is-great Department: The lawsuit is over (Lessig Blog):

We received this happy missive in the mail yesterday: The plaintiffs in the lawsuit about Virgin using a CC-licensed photo have dismissed CC from the case. This is not a settlement. It is not the product of negotiation. It is the recognition by plaintiffs counsel that the laws of Texas and the United States give the plaintiffs no cause to sue Creative Commons.

As I said when I announced the lawsuit here, the fact that the laws of the United States don't make us liable for the misuse in this context doesn't mean that we're not working extremely hard to make sure misuse doesn't happen. It is always a problem (even if not a legal problem) when someone doesn't understand what our licenses do, or how they work. We need to work harder to make that clear. But the news today lets us go back to t

To plug both Professor Lessig and Penn State's own Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology, Professor Lessig was recently confirmed as the keynote speaker for the 2008 Symposium. As a plug for Creative Commons Licensing, my blog uses one variation of the flexible scheme.

While I was at VON 2007, I saw the Guitar Hero playing robot at one of the booths on the show floor. It was at this point that I realized that I really need a new cell phone because wouldn't it have been cool to capture what I saw. Luckily, Jeff Pulver posted some video of it to YouTube. Saved by "The Google" once again!

I am sitting in Boston's Logan Airport at about 8am Friday morning. I don't have much to say today. "Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit...I will be brief." I am glad to be going home. My brain hurts a little bit from all the information I have assimilated this week. Wow, that was Shakespeare and the Borg all in one paragraph! I am tired, but I woke up at 4am since I am excited to be seeing my family in a few short hours. The cab driver who brought me to the airport was from Ethiopia, and he only sees his family every 7 months. I guess 6 days isn't so long after all.

Today is the last day of VON 2007. The expo booths are being torn down, and we are left with smaller groups attending classes. Fortunately, there was an admin training course that ran all day covering OpenSER. I won't bore you with the details of this implementation of the SIP Express Router. It is only a means to an end for handling the potential volume of calls that our SoftPhone project may experience once it becomes an official psu.edu service. One interesting aspect has been that the course is being presented by one of the founders of this open source project, Daniel-Constantin Mierla.

In the afternoon, I attended a VoIP security strategy panel. The participants were Joshua Morin of Codenomicon, Aaron Sipper of Reef Point, and Dan York of the VoIP Security Alliance. Reactivity in security is unacceptable as a strategy.

There were two themes that ran through the discussion.

• There are great tools out there, but most people, carriers included, are not making use of them.
• Most security plans have not taken phones into consideration. User devices are moving toward the PC model, where these devices are intelligent and therefore exploitable.

As Penn State, we really need to take the proverbial bull by the horns, and be proactive in our security tactics. Port scanning is one tool;packet watching is another. The next time you plan a new service spend the design time on security auditing. Hack it yourself to evaluate the system. Ask a friend to hack it for you. If you get compromised, the you need to share that information with the rest of the Penn State community so that we can all learn from the experiences. I will now step off the soap box. ☺

Today made for a few more interesting speakers in the morning. The first speaker was Tero Ojanperä from Nokia. This meeting was something of a sales pitch, but the subject revolved around the new API toolset that Nokia is releasing called OVI. They seem to be genuinely interested in allowing users to create their own experiences. Thanks to Twitter ,Jaiku, and Pownce, the mobile internet appears to be opening up. At least for the 900 million Nokia phones that are out there somewhere.

The second speaker was Ali Tabassi from Sprint/Nextel. Xohm is the brand name of a new mobile internet service that will exist in the 2.5GHz spectrum. They have their sights on a change in buying style for mobile internet devices. Picture a model where you can buy a device and then choose a provider. Of course, this breaks free for them from the model of subsidizing devices.

The third and most interesting of the speakers was the CTO of Digium, Mark Spencer. Mark is the inventor of Asterisk, the open source PBX. Asterisk was voted the most influential entity in Voice over IP in 2006. It also happens to be one of the tools that we are piloting for the SoftPhone Project. SoftPhone is a way to extend Penn State communications beyond the closed networks of today. If you have ever used Skype, then you will understand what we are trying to create for Penn State use, but unlike Skype, we are building on open standards that allow others to work with us. His hope for open source telephony is that ways be found to use it that are interesting and different from the same old thing. The last element that made this particular event memorable, was that during questions and answers the fire alarm sounded forcing an evacuation of the entire conference center.

I also attended a panel discussion on the use of Asterisk and OpenSER in enterprise environments. One of the speakers was Deke Kassabian from the University of Pennsylvania. He discussed how Penn has been using SER and Asterisk to rollout 25,000 telephone devices on their campus. Penn State's own work with SER and Asterisk has been focusing on enabling user mobility rather than replacing our own relatively young VoIP infrastructure. I was lucky to have a conversation over lunch with Deke and one of his senior engineers, Steve Blair. It was great to hear the perspective of another EDU.

The last presentation that I attended was more for me than for Penn State. I really wanted to hear Jon "maddog" Hall speak about open source and Linux as well as its place in the world. If you ever have the opportunity to listen to one of his presentations, you should. He is intelligent and also very straight-forward. His willingness to cut to the chase is probably one small part of why his students gave him the nickname. His talk focused on how the world as a whole needs open source because the solutions that are required can't be done by a few software companies. He also suggested that for IT to survive, the stagnation of the U.S. and Western Europe needs the development that can come from the rest of the world. Go Tux!

Here we are at Day 2. Today was technically the first day of the conference. At least it was the first day of the floor show. Instead of one really focused presentation, I have a bit of expo ADHD to share.

Keynote Speakers

• Jeff Pulver, Mr. VON, if you will, was the first speaker today. His keynote focused heavily upon the need of the telecomm industry to start waking up to the notion of social network applications. He spoke a bit about Facebook, and called for those companies do more than make a PBX for Facebook. It's time to do more than voice on the internet.
• Embarq's Chairman and CEO, Dan Hesse, detailed his company's plans to converge mobile business with the landline services. This service is quite similar to what Verizon offers and is not really that innovative.
• The final speaker was Jeff Weber, the VP of Product Strategy for AT&T. His talk was quite similar to that of Dan Hesse. These older telecomm companies are going to have to wake up to the difference between telecomm and internet services. Telecomm doesn't have the growth or scale of the internet.

Video Conferencing

Polycom was the biggest vendor to make an appearance. This was fortunate because we have been discussing the possibility of introducing HD video conferencing to the network, but until now there have been a few key items missing. I would have preferred to meet with Tandberg and Lifesize, but Radvision was present with their Scopia products that also support HD.

There hasn't been a reasonably priced HD codec that compares with the current Polycom VSX series in use at Penn State. Also, the ITS multi-point control unit is not currently capable of bridging high-definition calls. There is a new 8000 series codec from Polycom that has become more affordable for us to consider. It is still more expensive than standard definition though. Tell me what you think community, is there a need for High Definition Video Conferencing in your business?

E-911 (Enhanced 911) Solutions

• The first company that I spoke with regarding some possible emergency calling solutions was called 911 Enable. This company provides a hosted E-911 service that would if necessary be able to track VoIP end points at the MAC address level.
• The other E-911 provider at the show was HBF who was offering i-911 for VoIP. HBF also hosts the service for the customer.

Penn State Case Study

We have been experimenting with open-source SIP telephony solutions that will be used to create additional VoIP offerings for Penn State outside the traditional systems built by Cisco and Avaya. We have been testing a few Session Border Controllers (SBCs) made by Ingate. Ingate is a relatively small engineering company that makes devices that help protect the network from malicious traffic. Their size is not really a factor as their product is quite good.

I was lucky enough to meet the Swedish CEO of Ingate, Olle Westerberg, and the president of their American office, Steve Johnson today. We had a great conversation about the devices. I had to be up front with them that I was not the primary engineer assigned to the testing of their SIParator products. Olle explained to me how they have been wrestling internally with the method of configuration. If they want to target the SOHO and SMB markets, then they cannot rely on the typically overworked IT administrator to learn the complex rule sets that are available in these devices.

Olle was also very curious to learn why specifically we chose the Ingate products for our pilot project. There are many SBC vendors, but the Ingate was relatively inexpensive as well as both flexible and scalable for our current needs. I described some of our tentative ideas for deploying the SoftPhone project in a way that would enable each of Penn State's 23 locations to participate. Both Steve and Olle were interested in perhaps forming some level of partnership to create a case study. I hope to be involved in that case study, but if not, I am still glad for the glad for the chance to bring that opportunity to the university.

That is enough for today. When this gets posted Wednesday morning, I will be eagerly awaiting Digium CTO, Mark Spencer's keynote. You will likely hear about that tomorrow.

Today was my first day attending VON. It was a workshop day, and I attended the SIP Tutorial Workshop that was presented by Henry Sinnreich and Alan Johnston. Henry Sinnreich works in Internet Communications Architecture at Adobe Systems. Alan Johnston works as a Consulting Member of Technical Staff at . Alan has had a hand in the writing of the standard RFC (Request for Comment) documentation for SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol).

The workshop started out a little slow in the first hour, but it progressed very quickly from the introduction and basic definition of SIP-based communications to the discussion of current IETF initiatives to create peer-to-peer applications. SIP is a connection initiation protocol that is fast becoming the standard for voice communications. SIP has the potential to be much more than just another telephone thing. SIP can control ad hoc video conferencing, IM and quite a few others. So how successful could a P2P telephony application be anyway? Well, have you ever heard of Skype?

Skype is a completely proprietary mechanism for IM, voice, and video. They hide their magical stuff that allows communication to occur, but it is in fact all peer to peer. There was much talk about how the protocol actually would work in a p2p environment. I won't bore you with the technical details, but if you are interested here is a partial list of cited references from the 8 hour session. This list is in no particular order.

1. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), RFC 3261
2. Session Description Protocol (SDP), RFC 2327
3. Real Time Protocol, RFC 3550, RFC 3551, and RFC 3611.
4. NAT Behavioral Requirements for UDP

After spending the entire day in workshop, I attended the panel discussion on SIP Trunking at the end of the session where I heard something that really caught my attention. The moderator asked the panel where they expected SIP technology to be in 5 years. The most interesting prediction ironically came from typically traditional PBX solution provider Avaya. Avaya was represented by Anne L. Coulombe who works on their SIP strategies. She predicts that in 5 years there will be a social networking aspect to this technology.

This prediction really resonated with me. I was immediately brought back to an ITS white paper that was recently released 7 Things You Need to Know about Facebook Applications. This white paper was a joint effort between Teaching and Learning with Technology and the University Libraries. The Penn State Libraries have released a Facebook application that basic search features of the Libraries' catalog.

I pose this question today rather than in 5 years. Why not enable social networking and SIP today for Penn State? Conceptually, we could create a Penn State specific voice, video, and IM SIP application that is used through Facebook. Does anyone want to give it a try?

Day 2 here I come!

Posted using my first wifi connectivity in two days. I can feel the withdrawal pains easing already. I wrote this on Sunday.

Once upon a time, I used to travel frequently for work. I worked for a company that had facilities in Houston, TX as well as Mount Union and Bethlehem, PA. I had all the frequent flyer and hotel rewards stuff down to a science. I haven't been on the road for more than a day trip since I started working at Penn State, which was just after my son (my second child) was born. This morning, I said goodbye to my two children, the oldest was crying and the youngest just wanted to watch The Wiggles. I had forgotten how much gets missed when away from home. Sure the breaks from routine are nice, but there are regrets for missing bedtime stories and playing trains on the living room floor.

VON 2007 here I come. I am looking forward to a great week learning about new solutions for IP Telephony, IPTV, and Video Conferencing. There will be some great open standards solutions represented there. I will just be looking forward a little more to picking up my kids on Friday when I get home.