Opening Address

Tom Boland is the Chief Executive Officer of the Higher Education Authority, a post he was appointed to in January 2004. He was appointed interim Chairman of the HEAnet Board of Directors in September 2005. He is a career civil servant who has served in the Department of Justice, the Office of the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Education and Science. In the Department of Education and Science he worked as legal adviser and as Director of Strategic Policy. He played a central role in putting in place a modern legislative basis for the education sector at all levels, including the first Education Act, the first Universities Act and the first Act relating to the education of people with special educational needs. He holds qualifications in civil engineering from NUIG and law (The King's Inns), and was called to the Irish Bar in 1989.

Real Time Support in Wireless Networks

Mark received an MSc in Networks and Distributed Systems in 2004 after receiving his degree in Computer and Electronic Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin in 2003. He currently is working towards a PhD with the Distributed Systems Group in the Dept of Computer Science, Trinity College. His key research interests include real-time communication over wireless networks and the use of FPGA technology to develop and evaluate media access control protocols in the wireless environment.

VLE's and E-Learning

Cormac McClean works as a lecturer in Software Engineering in Athlone Institute of Technology where he teaches Software Development and Linux System Administration. An advocate of Free/Open Source Software, he also is passionate about teaching and learning, and happily he combines these interests in the field of Free/Open Source eLearning. He maintains two complementary systems in Athlone IT, Moodle (http://moodle.org) and Fle3 (http://fle3.uiah.fi). In a previous life his failure to read the full details of an End-User Licence Agreement meant that he mistakenly sold his soul to the software industry where he languished for a number of years, but an unexpected buy-back opportunity resulted in his return to full spiritual integrity.

What is Whois and why? - The RIPE Database

Ingrid Wijte is an IP Resource Analyst in the RIPE NCC Registration Services Department. The department is responsible for the allocation and assignment of Internet number resources to RIPE NCC members. Ingrid also delivers LIR Training Courses to these members.

Ingrid has worked part-time in the RIPE NCC Software Engineering Department, providing assistance to RIPE Database users in the RIPE Database Manager role. She was also involved in the Early Registration Transfer Project (ERX), an RIR co-ordination activity to ensure that legacy resources are registered in the correct database.

The presentation will start with an introduction to the RIPE NCC, RIPE and the RIPE Database. This will be followed by more detailed information covering RIPE Database statistics, the ERX project and database tools. Ingrid will also explain how to query and update the RIPE Database, methods of protecting database objects and information about the contact details publicly available. Finally, there will also be an explanation of how to use the test database.

Building International Future Networks

Roberto is Chief Technical Officer of DANTE and is responsible for the technical developments of the GEANT network and its upcoming successor, GEANT2. He joined DANTE in 1997 after previous experiences at the universities of Turin and Cambridge and in the Italian telecomminucation industry. He holds an Italian Laurea in Computer Science.

The Erosion of Privacy

In the computing and internet domain, data privacy remains a fraught subject. From traffic data retention to identity cards, chip-and-pin 'security' to mobile location data, we seem determined to cause more problems with our security solutions than find ways to solve them. And a world increasingly anxious about security issues is itself vulnerable to being convinced that surrendering personal privacy will help, rather than become part of the problem. Along with detecting the (data) watchers, we need to be watching the detectives.

Disruptive Internet Technologies

The impact of technology on the world and on 3rd level institutions has been profound. However, are the institutions ready for the next wave of technology that can potentially upset many of the traditional ways of working. This talk explores the possibility of major changes in technology that are probably being actively resisted by the existing service areas in the institutions.

Identity Management

Caroline Sheedy is a PhD candidate in the School of Computing at Dublin City University and her research area is Identity Management. Her primary degree is a B.Sc in Mathematical Sciences and she also holds an M.Sc in Security & Forensic Computing, both from DCU.
The presentation will introduce her current work on the open source PEIM (Privacy Enhanced Identity Management) libraries. These libraries will provide a cryptographic framework to facilitate an open source privacy and identity management system. An overview of some of the required cryptographic primitives will be given, and their use within the framework will be explained.

IPv6 Workshop

David Malone is a mathematician-cum-sysadmin. He is a researcher in the Hamilton Institute in Maynooth, Ireland, working on mathematical models of communications networks. Since 1994, he's also been a member of the sysadmin team of the School of Mathematics located in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. There he helps to maintain a Unix-like service provided by FreeBSD and Linux machines. Naturally, they all speak IPv6.

Niall Richard Murphy has been involved with the Internet since 1995, when he and many others founded the UCD Internet Society. He has worked for many of the core Internet organisations in Ireland, including the INEX, the IEDR, Ireland On-line and even HEAnet many moons ago. Niall is the author or co-author of numerous technical articles and talks, including an RFC on 3G and IPv6, and has spoken to audiences at numerous RIPE conferences and previous HEAnet Network conferences and workshops. He is the co-author of "IPv6 Network Administration: An Operational Guide to the Next Generation Protocol", published by O'Reilly.

Digital evidence in Computer Crime

Detective Inspector Paul Gillen is the head of the Computer Crime Investigation Unit (CCIU), a specialised unit within the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation charged with investigating computer-related crime. A member of the force since 1983, he has been working in the CCIU since 1996. Paul holds a Master of Science degree from the computer science school at UCD. He is a member of the Interpol Working party on IT crime and also a member of the Europol expert group on cyber crime. Paul was the project manager on a National & European funded project outlining the requirement for the development of cyber crime training for specialist investigators within the EU, He is also to be the project manager on a further national & european project which will develope academically accredited training for cyber crime investigators across the EU. He has spoken at events such as the ISSA's Cybercrime Forum and the HEANET National Networking Conference in 2001.

DNS, Brave New World

Tim Deegan is a third-year PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying the contents and usage patterns of the DNS, and designing possible changes to its architecture. In his spare time, he writes bootloaders and demo CDs for the Xen project. He previously worked as a sysadmin, with Baltimore Technologies' secure hosting group, and at the .IE TLD registry.

Copyright materials in VLEs

Helen Bartlett is Copyright Manager for HERON (a division of Ingenta). She has been involved in providing digital course readings for students since her involvement with eLib's pioneering 'SCOPE' project in 1997, and has been responsible for coordinating and obtaining the necessary permissions for online and paper coursepacks since 1998. She currently manages HERON's copyright clearance service for approximately 80 universities and colleges, involving over 1500 rightsholders. She has written various articles about the subject, (most recently a chapter in Paul Pedley's book Managing Digital Rights : A Practitioner's Guide) and presents regularly on the topic.

Network Congestion Control

Doug is a Research Professor & Director of the Hamilton Institute (www.hamilton.ie) at NUI Maynooth. His current research interests include internet congestion control and dynamics, resource allocation in wireless networks and nonlinear time series analysis.

Campus Firewalling

DIT are in the process of implementing a new firewall architecture for it's multi-campus network. Dearbhla will give an outline of why the upgrade was necessary and outline the process of replacing the existing firewall and the considerations taken. This presentation will describe the new design and give a description of the pitfalls and experiences of a replacement firewall implementation.
Dearbhla O'Reilly is Network Manager in the Dublin Institute of Technology. Dearbhla started out as a programmer following a BSc in Applied Mathematical Sciences. After some programming/systems administration roles, she took on this management role in 1995. DIT's voice and data network has expanded to service nearly 40 buildings in Dublin's city centre with further bandwidth upgrades planned. For DIT's network, the emphasis is now on infrastructure services and policies with technology planning for our new campus at Grangegorman top of the agenda.

Digital Repositries

Director of Library Services, DCU 1999-. Head of Library Services DIT 1997-1999. Various posts in TCD 1978-1997. Board member, SPARC Europe; Board member, International Association of Technological University Libraries. Professional interests: the Open Access movement; academic library collaboration; hybrid library developments.
Institutional repositories, by hosting freely available copies of scholarly information - peer reviewed articles, theses etc - aggregate an i/nstitution's/ intellectual output in one digital space. They provide a "shop window" for institutional intellectual output which would otherwise only be available dispersed in journals etc. They greatly increase the volume of research literature available to the scholarly community. Institutional repositores are potentially very important components of research support systems. They are spreading rapidly throughout the international scholarly community, and despite concerns, most publishers allow copies of their peer-reviewed articles to be lodged there. Irish university libraries are looking at developing such repositories in their own institutions.

Facilitating Guest Network Access

Key Drivers -Supporting teaching and research, conferences and commercial activities, changing end user expectations and competitive forces
Constraints - Administration and support, integration with existing infrastructure, processes and procedures, data security issues
Options - Survey of existing commercially available products, TCD trials
The Trinity College Guest network - Network services provided, block diagram, functionality of guest network appliance, configuration of subsystems, access codes and printing,
Experience to date and future plans - Statistics and feedback. Halls of residence, EduRoam

VIOLA

Dr. Peter Kaufmann is technical manager in the branch office of DFN-Verein (Deutsches Forschungsnetz). He has been responsible for the planning of advanced projects within DFN. Currently he is project leader for the VIOLA-testbed. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the Free University Berlin.

Irish Supercomputing

Dr Andy Shearer graduated from London University with a BSc in Astronomy in 1975. He subsequently obtained an MSc(1978) and PhD (1980) in Cosmic Ray Physics from Durham University. He worked as a post-doc in Bristol University and in Industry before taking up a research position in University College Galway in 1991. In 1996 he was appointed as a lecturer in the Information Technology Department at the renamed National University of Ireland, Galway. In 2005 he was appointed Director of the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC). His research interests cover high-performance computing, grid computing, medical and astronomical imaging processing, modelling astrophysical plasmas and high-time resolution astronomical observations.
The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) has been established through grants from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Higher Education Authority (HEA). Over the next three years ICHEC intends to develop into a large supercomputing centre which services the needs Irish researchers and will become a presence in EU supercomputing. In this presentation the centre will be described as well as our plans in the light of expected developments in cluster/node architecture. The links and future road map of Grid computing in the context of other supercomputing centres will also be explored.

John Boland is the Chief Executive Officer of HEAnet, Ireland's National Education & Research Network. He was appointed to this position in October 1997 when HEAnet was incorporated as a limited company with its own staff.

Prior to 1997 he worked as Systems and Networks Manager in the Computer Services Department of Dublin City University and represented DCU on the HEAnet Network Management Committee, before its incorporation.

Prior to joining DCU John worked in industry with a number of international companies including Marconi Communications Systems in the UK, Motorola Information Systems in the UK and the US and Westinghouse in Australia.

He holds a B. E. in electronic engineering from University College Dublin and has embarked on an ongoing M. Sc. in Computer Applications.

As CEO of HEAnet John is involved in the development of world-class Internet services for education and research in Ireland.

Currently John is a member of DANTE's Board of Directors, and represents HEAnet on the NREN GEANT Policy Committee, a collaboration between the European National Research Networks and the European Commission, delivering advanced pan-European research and education networking. He is also a member of the TERENA General Assembly (Trans European Research and Education Networking Association) and on the international task force for Internet2.

The Department of Education and Science have embarked on providing a broadband Schools Network for all Irish primary and secondary schools as part of the Government’s “Broadband for Schools Initiative”. In total, just under 4,000 schools will be connected to this network.

The Department have requested HEAnet to provide centrally managed access to the HEAnet Backbone and high-quality managed access to the Internet and other education networks worldwide. The centrally managed network to be provided by HEAnet will further provide a range of network services including, managed Internet access, security services for schools and email services.

This presentation will outline HEAnet’s project management approach to delivery, the network management design, the approach to aggregating six Access Providers, and the challenge of provisioning services for approximately 4,000 schools.

The presentation will be led by Ronan Byrne who is a Senior Project Manager at HEAnet tasked with the overall delivery of the Schools Network project.

There will also be a ‘Schools Network’ BOF during Thursday’s programme where members of HEAnet’s Schools Team will offer a technical discussion on the Schools Network design and present the various applications being used to deliver services to schools.

The members of the Schools Team are: Tim Maher, Technical Project Manager; Donal O’Cearbhaill, Systems Administrator; and Brian Scanlan, Systems Administrator.

Security Workshop

Warren joined HEAnet in 2001 and is currently a Security Expert. Prior to HEAnet he worked with Broadcom Eireann Research, Scientific Systems and EMC Corp. He holds qualifications in Electronic Engineering from DIT, Business from TCD and is a certified BS7799 auditor.
Contains theory and practical sessions working on IPSEC & SSL VPN solutions. The VPN solutions can accomodate a wide range of configurations, including remote access site-to-site VPNs WiFi security scaling up to enterprise-scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access-controls.

Scaling Apache for 25,000 users

Colm is a Senior Network Engineer in the Managed Network Services group at HEAnet, as well as a committer for the Apache httpd. apr and mod_ftp projects.
ftp.heanet.ie is a contender for the World's busiest webserver, and through utilising the unused outbound capacity of the HEAnet network performs a vital role in Network Development and testing as well as serving as a research platform for application scalability on Gigabit networks. This presentation will cover the design and methodology behind ftp.heanet.ie and its performance tuning and will cover many techniques which can be directly applied to campus servers and services.

Issues affecting Irish ISP's

Donal Cunningham is a Senior Network Engineer in the Network Operations group of HEAnet. A founder of the System Administrators' Guild of Ireland (ie.sage.org), he has worked for Telerate/Bridge, E*Trade and Lucent. Donal represents HEAnet at the ISP Association of Ireland (www.ispai.ie) and IBEC.
I will be covering the major legislative issues facing ISPs in Ireland in 2005, based on my experiences with the ISPAI. Items covered will include Intellectual Property Rights, the Television Without Frontiers directive and of course, Traffic Data Retention.