Meet the LISA '12 Speakers: Owen DeLong

In this interview, Owen DeLong, an IPv6 Evangelist at Hurricane Electric and a member of the ARIN Advisory Council, offers practical advice for first-time LISA attendees. Owen also answers one particularly important question: If you were a board game, which one would you be?

Rikki: You're leading an IPv6 session at LISA '12. Can you tell us a little more about what you'll cover and what attendees can expect to learn from your session?

Owen: Two, actually. One is an invited talk and the other is a Guru session. The Invited Talk is on the subject of IPv6 Address Planning and will focus on techniques for developing a plan for numbering IPv6 deployments in service providers and enterprises. The lack of scarcity and the elimination of NAT require significantly different thinking with regards to IPv6 and these are, in many ways, the biggest required cultural change to support this new protocol.

The "Guru" session is an opportunity for attendees to bring their questions, problems, posers, puzzles, and curiosity and seek answers from the community assembled. As an experienced IPv6 practitioner, I will moderate the discussion and contribute what I can to assisting the community in identifying solutions.

Rikki: This isn't your first time at a LISA event — what advice would you give a first-time attendee to help them get the most out of the event?

Owen: Look through the program well in advance and identify the sessions that are most important to you. It's very easy to get caught up in things and suddenly realize you've missed the session you really wanted to attend. It's also not unusual to find that sessions you want conflict with each other. In such cases, it's important to decide your priorities while you can. However, I think that the most valuable conference content is the combination of Guru sessions, hallway discussions, and social events where we get an opportunity to engage in more free form discussions. For it is these discussions where we connect most with our fellow administrators and gain the opportunity to gain knowledge well beyond the bounds of the conference.

Rikki: What do you like best about LISA conferences?

Owen: The caliber of people that they bring together and the opportunity to gain knowledge from so many rich sources all in a concentrated area and time.

Rikki: We're having a board game night at LISA on December 9th. If you were a board game, which one would you be?

Owen: Hmmm… Tough question. I think I'd have to say Quarto. It's a simple set of playing pieces and a simple 4x4 board, with relatively simple rules, yet very complex strategy, much like networking. It's similar to connect-four or tic-tac-toe in that your goal is to line up objects while preventing your opponent from doing so; however, there are two twists to this one. Objects can match on any of the following properties: shape{square,round}, height{short,tall}, color{dark,light}, or content{solid,hollow}. Victory is a 4-element contiguous row where all pieces have one of the four properties in common (all dark, all square, all hollow, etc.). The second twist is that when it is your turn, you pick a piece and give it to your opponent to place. Your opponent then picks a piece and gives it to you to place.

Rikki: Anything you'd like to add?

Owen: 40% of the world's RIRs are now in their IPv4 austerity policies. ARIN is down to less than 3 /8s in its free pool (not counting various reservations such as critical infrastructure, transition space, etc.).

If you are thinking that you can continue to procrastinate IPv6, I highly recommend attending one or both of my sessions at LISA.

Rikki: I'd like to thank Owen for taking time for this interview. If you have any questions about LISA '12, let us know. (And feel free to let us know in the comments which board game you'd be.)

Don't miss the Early Bird discount: Register by November 19th to save.

Additional reading:

Meet the LISA '12 Program Committee: Mike Ciavarella