Last week’s SwiNOG was (as expected) great fun at a phenomenal location, starting with the first slide of the first presentation: “6 Stages of Network De-sh*tification”. I particularly loved the “talk less, chat more” schedule. The longer breaks gave us plenty of time to catch up with old friends and discuss interesting, sometimes completely unexpected, topics. For example, I learned that SIP MESSAGE is used to carry SMS messages these days.

As much as I loved chatting with fellow networking engineers, I also found these presentations highly interesting:

• Understanding and optimising transceiver power consumption – yet another traditionally interesting transceiver presentation by a guy in an orange T-shirt (if you’ve been to European NOG conferences, you know who I’m talking about ;)
• Shared spectrum and MOFN on various technologies one can use to share dark fiber
• What AI Can (and Can’t) Do – a practical (experience-based) view on the possibilities and limitations of AI (LLMs in particular) in networking by a developer of an AI-based network operations tool.
• Scaling Multi-Domain Fabrics with EVPN Gateways – while we covered the topic in an ipSpace.net webinar, it was nice to have an excellent refresher and Arista’s view on the topic
• I was finally able to listen to the Network Automation Framework presentation, this time by Damien Garros.
• The Building a Vendor-Agnostic E2E Testing Ecosystem with Netlab presentation described a crazy idea: a pytest harness that starts a virtual lab with netlab to execute the tests.

As always, you can find the presentations and the videos on the SwiNOG 41 webpage.

Last but definitely not least, SwiNOG decided to have two meetings a year. Together with the Swiss Network User Group (CHNUG) meetups (described by Severin Dellsperger in the last presentation), we’ll have plenty of great reasons to come back to Switzerland.