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07/08/2004: "Geek Conferences in Iraq"

Doc Searls is recommending a "new" kind of IT conference:

So I'm thinking about what a DIY-IT event might be like. This much I'm sure of: It wouldn't be vendor-centric or vendor-oriented. It would be mostly about what IT shops are doing on their own, with or without the help of vendors. But what else? Let's see...

Here's a short list:

A collegial setting — not necessarily a hotel, but certainly convenient to inexpensive and comfortable accomodations. A university, perhaps?


Sessions and panels that are based around subjects more than around personalities. In other words, foster conversation among colleagues, not the usual lecturing to an "audience."


Hacking would be involved. Techies would get together with other techies to solve common problems. I've seen these at JabberCon (whatever happened to that event?) and ApacheCon, among other places, and think they're useful in countless ways.


The quality of a retreat, rather than yet another Professional Event.

While I haven't been to one lately (not since 1992, in fact), USENIX used to be a lot like what Doc describes, especially the BOFs, and except for the hotel part. (Gotta stay somewhere.) Hotel management can be rapacious, (I know for a fact that USENIX will never return to Nashville after what happened there), but asking a university to play host to several hundred new folks seems questionable.

I dunno, maybe DEFCON, but even thats in a hotel. Or perhaps better, the Geek Cruises, but this probably violates the Cluetrain-conversation/sharing part above.

The part that bothers me about what Doc proposes is that it seems to view vendors as evil. Potentially necessary, but lets route around that. The thing is, someone put together the machines, racks, Ethernet switches, NIC cards, disks, tape drives, power strips, etc. Without vendors, it would be pretty difficult to have any kind of IT.

Now, I'm not all that fond of packaged solutions. In my view they're often more precipitate thant solution. I build most of my own software (Hey, I can make that claim, I run Gentoo on most of the computers, and due to the nature of the vendor that I am, I even build the software that runs on most of my devices), but I will run closed software (I'm typing this on a PowerBook.) In fact, I like the PowerBook mostly because of its packaging.

Back when I was CTO @ Wayport, we wrote our own billing system (ran on linux), our own captive portal (ran on linux), ran our own routers (ran on linux, and were named NMDs for entirely arcane reasons). We even produced our own Ethernet switches.

Even with all that, there was a time when the CEO wouldn't allow us to say "linux" in front of a customer. Funny thing is, this same CEO had an absolute shit-fit when I tried to introduce him to Cluetrain. Brett thought I was using it to take-over the company. (I'm not kidding, and no, I wasn't trying.)

My interest in building open-source (natch, GPLed!) networking platforms stems from this experience, and my frustration at being able to buy, at a reasonable price, the things I needed to make Wayport go, plus my days at Smallworks, building firewall, VPN, and DHCP technology, most of which was source-available.

It also allows our customers to create the products they want, rather than what we can get to. It avoids the whole "tell me how much you'll spend" pretext to the customization of a product. By giving others access to the source, our customer can understand our product to a level of depth that no manual will ever supply, change and extend it to perform as they wish, and even go elsewhere for support, should we fail to provide same, or go out of business.

That said, I spend an incredible amount of time on the phone with customers, troubleshooting problems that are presented to be problems with what we sell, but which instead are elsewhere. Today's examples include:

Customer in east Texas with three HS3000s all nicely bridged together via WDS. The first problem was basically that they had managed to create a hidden-terminal problem for themselves, and after that was solved (via enabling RTS/CTS), it became evident that their little Linksys gateway was misbehaving quite badly.


Customer in France who is upgrading his AP100s from their as-shipped brick-like state, but needed help with Window's Hyperterminal and tftp.

I could go on. I friend of mine, Erik Fair once said in the comments of a program called Agent Orange

"Networking is the Vietnam of computing. Something can nuke you from behind, and it's gone when you turn around. It's impossible to win a guerrilla war against a highly distributed enemy." - Mike Smith