During an event of the regional security initiative called KA-IT-SI I gave a presentation about why and how DE-CIX started the ISO 27001 on basis of BSI IT Grundschutz certification process. As project leader and a former security officer of DE-CIX I gave insights into the lessons the project team learned during the nearly two years I drove this project. After I finished my talk a security consultant who was also part of the project team talked about how he as a third-party perceived the endeavor. His talk was followed by a presentation given by the leader of the auditor team that conducted the audit which lead to the certificate. Finally, the ISO 27001 on basis of IT Grundschutz certificate was handed over from a representative of the BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) to Arnold Nipper (COO, CTO DE-CIX Management GmbH).
The event took place in the beautiful panorama room in the building of the camber of commerce in Karlsruhe. After the certificate was handed over the less formal part of the event started with champaign and delicious food. I left nearly two hours later after I have talked to many of the 50 people who attended this event.
This is probably my last posting in this area of my blog as I left DE-CIX a couple of month ago. The past two years with the DE-CIX crew were just wonderful! I learned a lot! I am sure my team and I, we made DE-CIX a safer place. I really enjoyed working with so skilled and professional people as the DE-CIX crew. All the best for DE-CIX and its employees.
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 16:51 2010-05-13 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Lots of Events: Nanog 47, GPF 4.5, CNX3, 15th Euro-IX Forum, 1st Symposium on Ditigal Infrastructure (DE-CIX)
In the last couple of weeks I was attending lots of events. It started with the Nanog 47 meeting in Dearborn, Mi, USA. It was quite enlightening to talk to so many excellent network engineers and network managers. The most interesting session for me was the peering session. The guys from Hurrican Electric bought a cake for Cogent to convince Cogent to peer with them. Quite funny! :-)
DE-CIX is one of the hosts of the Global Peering Forum (GPF) 4.5. As this was my first GPF at all, it was very interesting to meet so many customers of DE-CIX at one place. To make sure I had the opportunity to talk to as many customers as possible I decided to manage the booth that gave away the free GPF 4.5 T-shirts. It was great fun to give away shirts while talking to customers.
After the GPF I attended the Third Carrier Exchange Network (CNX3) event. During the CNX3 I gave a power-talk about "Security Needs of the DE-CIX Covered by ISO 27001 and BSI IT Grundschutz ". The discussion after the talk was very enlightening as many attendees were thinking of getting a security certificate. The questions and comments showed that it is quite difficult to select an appropriate process to get a particular security certificate. I think, security consultancy firms should come up with additional aids to solve this problems.
The 15th Euro-IX forum was held in Rome, Italy. For me, it was the first time in Rome. I was really impressed about this lovely city with all the vintage sculptures and ruins. As nice as the city the program of the Euro-IX forum was. I am a member of the program committee and hence I was really interested in the talks of the route server session. The progress the different route server implementations made during the last six months was quite impressive. The talks of the security sessions were also very enlightening however as I chaired this session I already knew the slides, so the content was not really new to me. :-)
Yesterday, I attended the first symposium on digital infrastructure in Frankfurt. Prof. Beck talked about a survey investigating the co-location industries. For me it was interesting to learn that co-location prices dropped about eight percent during the last twelve month.
These were lots of events all over the world for the last couple of weeks. However, it looks like it will be a bit more quiet until Christmas. :-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 17:33 2009-11-27 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Bachelor Thesis about "Zertifizierte IT-Sicherheit in KMU" (DE-CIX)
Lucius Eder, a bachelor student from the university of applied sciences Darmstadt, submitted his bachelor thesis about "Zertifizierte IT-Sicherheit in KMU" last week. The thesis is in German and hence the title is also in German. Lucius worked for the last four month on the thesis at DE-CIX and I supervised his work. In this thesis he investigated if and how IT-security standards such as ISO 27001 and BSI IT-Grundschutz fit the requirements and processes of small and medium businesses. He deeply investigated this questions with respect to the DE-CIX Management GmbH. His findings are very interesting and helpful for the further decision processes at DE-CIX.
Posted by Thomas King at 17:26 2009-11-27 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Which Programming Languages to Use at an Internet Exchange Point (DE-CIX)
At DE-CIX and on the Euro-IX mailing lists some discussion is going on which programming languages are currently used at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). I am assuming that the sets of programming languages used at the different IXPs should show to be quite congruent. So far, I cannot provide information about how diverse the sets of programming languages used at the different IXPs are because the discussing is still going on.
At DE-CIX it was common to use a few programming and scripting languages (e.g., C, Perl, bash), however, since I have joined DE-CIX many software projects have been done using Java. I personally believe Java is a good language for an IXP because it provides the following advantageous:
- Java is fast and reliable
- Java is object-oriented
- Java is platform independent (meaning it runs on Linux, Windows and so on)
- Java comes with many modern quality assurance tools (e.g., junit)
- Java can be used for scripting (by using Groovy)
- Java can easily be used for network programming
- Java provides a reasonable good regex interface for string processing
- Java can be used to create bindings to C and C++ libraries (by using the Java Native Interface)
To back up my statement that Java is a well suited programming language in the area of IXPs the following list shows which libraries and tools are used at DE-CIX for Java projects:
- jsflow
- junit
- rocksaw
- jpcap
- Java SNMP Package
- Trilead SSH
- Various packages provided by Apache commons
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 23:34 2009-10-19 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Bachelor Thesis about "Monitoring the DE-CIX Hardware - From a Concept to an Implementation" (DE-CIX)
Last week, Jan Stumpf - a student from the University of Applied Science Furtwangen - submitted his bachelor thesis about "Monitoring the DE-CIX Hardware - From a Concept to an Implementation". I adviced Jan's work during his stay at DE-CIX. In this thesis, Jan first summarized and structured the theory about monitoring hard- and software infrastructures. Secondly, Jan talked to the engineers to understand the requirements they have about monitoring the DE-CIX hard- and software. Thirdly, Jan implemented a monitoring system based on the results of the two previous mentioned parts. The results are very impressive. DE-CIX is considering to apply most of his findings and newly developed software tools! It was great fun to advise Jan and I am looking forward to work with him on other projects.
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 21:32 2009-09-06 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
DE-CIX and Friends @ JPMorgan Corporate Challenge (DE-CIX)
Last Wednesday, around 70,000 people met in Frankfurt to run 5,6km as part of the world-wide JPMorgan Corporate Challenge. The DE-CIX Management GmbH registered a team of 14 runners. It was great fun to run with my colleagues and friends the 5,6km. One runner only needed 31 minutes while the biggest part of the team (= 9 runners) needed around 35 minutes to finish the run. The finish shooting shown below shows the group of nine crossing the finish line. Can you spot me? ;-)
It was great fun and I am looking forward to being part of JPMorgan Corporate Challenge 2010. :-)
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 15:45 2009-06-21 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
14th Euro-IX in Prague (DE-CIX)
I attended the 14th Euro-IX forum in Prague where I gave a presentation about "Peakflow + jsFlow: A Working Solution for Large IXs" and I chaired the security workshop. Both my presentation and the workshop went pretty well. You can see both recorded here.
This Euro-IX forum was the second Euro-IX forum I was attending. As last time, it was of a great pleasure for me to meet all these people who run Internet exchanges all over the world. I had a lot of fruitful discussion with many of them. For me as a bloody beginner in the field of Internet exchanges it is great to learn from so many experienced and well-educated people. The next Euro-IX forum will be held in Rom and the chances are good that I am going to attend this one as well. I am really looking forward to it.
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 23:35 2009-05-10 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
jsFlow 0.1 Released (DE-CIX)
jsFlow is a Java library for sFlow v5. Currently, it supports all headers that are supported by Force10 E-1200 switches. Force10 E-1200 switches support only a sub-set of the headers that are specified in the sFlow specification. So, if you want use the jsFlow library with any other device than a Force10 E-1200 switch it might be the case that jsFlow does not support all headers coming from your device. However, as jsFlow is designed to be extensible it should be easy to add missing headers.
jSflow is released under the GPLv2 and can be downloaded here. As I have been implementing jsFlow for a internal project at DE-CIX I am happy that the management of DE-CIX supported my wish to open-source jsFlow. The current version of jsFlow is 0.1 indicating that a lot of work has to be done in order to get a full-fledged sFlow library. So, please feel to contribute to jsFlow. I will be happily accept patches that fix a bug or add new features!
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 23:28 2009-05-10 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
