Monday, November 30, 2009

IKEv2 project now on OpenSolaris

The IKEv2 project page is now available here on OpenSolaris. There's mailing-list information and a brief hello. We are working on design-level issues right now and some larval code, so c'mon over as we start to fire this up.

Monday, November 23, 2009

End-to-end Research Group is ending

Let me quote BBN's Craig Partridge on the Internet Research Task Force's end2end-interest mailing list:

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

After 26 years, the End-to-End Research Group has decided to cease existence
as of January 1st, 2010. While there is certainly still end-to-end research
to be done, the group had ceased to effectively serve as a forum for those
discussions.

The E2E group had a great run, serving as a place where many researchers
could bring their ideas for initial, informal, airing. The meetings could be
bruising. (At one meeting, a member tried to encourage a speaker by saying
"We're all friends here" only to pause and say, "No, I'm sorry, actually we
eat our young, but proceed anyway"). But the meetings usually also brought
insights.

Ideas that were tested in E2E meetings include slow start and improved
round-trip time estimation, Random Early Drop, Integrated and Differentiated
Services, Weighted Fair Queuing, PAWS, and Transaction TCP.


When I learned about the group (and their enlightening e-mail list), my networking professor described it as covering, "End to end, and everything in between..." Now you half-dozen readers know the exact origin of my previous (was "this") blog's name.

Luckily, the mailing alias will still be around. Still, the cliche, "End of an era," really applies here. It's yet another sign of the Internet's maturity, and that the really new places for research are probably somewhere not a lot of people are examining.

Anyone else have something to say about the End-to-End Research Group going away?