Salsa Call 29-June-06

*Attendees*
Mark Poepping, CMU (chair)
Charles Yun, Internet2
Doug Pearson, Indiana/REN-ISAC
Ken Klingenstein, Internet2
Renee Frost, Internet2
Rodney Petersen, Educause
Chris Misra, U. Mass
Terry Gray, U. Washington

*Discussion*
Ken noted that Charles' upcoming departure is an opportunity for us to assess current activities under Salsa. Charles will be missed, and goes to his new opportunity with our best wishes.

- DNSSEC update
a few campuses are ready to begin pilot, led by Shinkuro, I2 will provide flywheel support as needed. It appears poised to be a self-sustaining activity in the near future. A European company has also expressed interest in participating

Currently it is a peer-to-peer signing process, but there are signs that Educause (via Verisign) may be ready to go to sign the .edu TLD sometime within a year or so, pending an updated spec and further SW testing.

There is a session scheduled at Joint Techs on this topic.

- Abilene Operational Security Exercise (ABOSE)
Time to think about an international event, which would begin to test some of the human processes? This is clearly the direction it should be heading. While this is an Abilene issue more than a Salsa issue per se, Salsa is providing higher-level direction and input and this will in turn inform security planning for NewNet.

- Optical Bypass
The Optical bypass group meeting at Joint Techs in Albuquerque addressed point-to-point lambdas which bypass organizational security infrastructure. This is still early, but there is interest in the community for tracking it and continuing the conversation in future meetings - toward potentially developing effective practices.

Where does NetGuru fit into this picture? Like optical bypass, it is looking more at near term sets of issues. Is this all part of advanced net mgmt as we define it? -

Reconnections Next Steps - Advanced Net Mgmt.
Mechanism for convening campuses and relevant vendors for an ongoing activity in this space would be useful. Could/should the optical bypass work be folded into this?

There would appear to be value in ongoing activity around this, i.e. spinning up a Salsa working group for this purpose. There are a couple potential candidates to lead this activity, more to come on this...

Potential workshops, e.g. adjacent to another meeting: NetGuru one day, perhaps transitioning to Reconnections Next Steps?

NewNet will likely be a driver for some of this activity ongoing - maybe worthy of its own set of calls?

We will hold off on Optical Bypass until the next NetGuru meeting at the Winter Joint Techs, and a Reconnections follow-on workshop focused on advanced network management would be a logical thing to hold as an adjunct to this.

It would be useful for us to clarify the venues in which we expect the output to be information exchange - best practices etc. - v. the venues in which the goal is to speak as customers toward the goal of influencing the environment - e.g. to provide feedback/suggestions to vendors. These likely require 2 different approaches in terms of structure.

- Disaster Recovery
There is growing interest in this among the higher-ed community, what should we be doing on this? Is this logically one umbrella working group, or several - e.g. file-systems/disk-farms, e-mail, networking? Which specific operational services logically fall into this?

Some campuses are already working on bilateral relationships - providing backup/fail-over to each other.

Risk assessment in this context would include not only the risks being avoided, but also the risks inherent in moving/protecting your data offsite.

Educause is planning to hold a summit on this topic in early August, Rodney will report on the outcomes. It would make sense for us to wait until afterwards to plan our activities, and we also may want to participate in some way.

- Upcoming meetings
IETF is upcoming July 9-14 in Montreal, we will have a couple folks there. Curious to hear what happens on NEA. Next one is in San Diego November 5-10

Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet (SRUTI '06), 7-July San Jose Proceedings: http://www.usenix.org/events/sruti06/tech/

Joint Techs Next is July 16-20 in Madison, followed by Feb 11-15 in Minneapolis http://jointtechs.es.net/wisconsin2006/index.html