The IRNOG4 Meeting

Following the last IRNOG event in 2020 there was a cessation of further conferences due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, however, after careful consideration of existing COVID-19 restrictions, the IRNOG PC arrived at the decision to go ahead with plans for IRNOG4.

We decided attendees would be given the option to attend the meeting in person, under the requirement that everyone taking part would be required to comply with all relevant health protocols - e.g. social distancing, checking vaccination records, fever measuring, etc. Of course, many IRNOG members wanted to participate in the event remotely, so we also made preparations to broadcast the event live online as well. To facilitate this, we took steps to attract a connectivity sponsor who was able to provide high-quality Internet and another sponsor for the live broadcast service. As participants from both inside and outside the country had opted to present remotely, the importance of high-quality communication was very high.

Having put all this in place, the event went ahead as planned. Here's a summary of the talks and topics that were addressed at IRNOG4.

IRNOG4

The fourth IRNOG meeting was held on Thursday 3 February 2022 at the Conference Center of the Industrial Management Organisation in Tehran, Iran. It brought together around 200 experts to exchange views and share experiences. IRNOG4 broke a number of records for previous IRNOG meetings in terms of:

• Number of participants - 200 In-person and many more online
• Number of sponsors - 6 sponsors
• Number of presentations - 9 presentations
• The inclusion of a new "Women In Tech" session

First Session

After the opening ceremony during which PC Chair Milad Afshari welcomed all attendees to the event, Hassan Jabbari gave a presentation on DCIM, referring to the problems in the commercial data centre space of the country.

Following this, Hisham Ibrahim (CCO of the RIPE NCC), who attended the meeting virtually, gave a community update from the RIPE NCC. His talk touched on the impact that sanctions have had on Iranian LIRs, and he gave details on actions the RIPE NCC has been taking to tackle these difficulties.

Further, Pouria Mousavizadeh gave a presentation regarding using FreeBSD as SD-WAN Edges and Mehran Kholdi spoke about eBPF and challenged the audience in this regard.

Lunchtime and F2F Chat

The one-hour lunchtime gave participants a great opportunity to talk face to face about the current issues of the Internet industry in Iran after two years. According to the list of registrants, we had a significant number of newcomers who had a better chance to get more familiar with the IRNOG community atmosphere.

Before starting the next part of the program, it was time to hand out the IRNOG T-shirts.

Second Session

The next session started with another presentation dedicated to the subject of EVPN/VXLAN. Ehsan Ghazizadeh talked to the community about the new era of data centres in Iran, explaining the topic in great detail.

Milad Afshari also presented about the MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security), pointing to the need for network operators in Iran to implement security solutions, thereby helping the Internet community achieve reliable BGP routing and contribute to a more reliable Internet.

Segment Routing Overview was also the subject of Reza Khaloakbari's online presentation, and Vahid Shahbazian was the last presenter to discuss Layer3 Hardware Offloading in RouterOS v7.

"Women In Tech" Panel

Before the end of the presentations, a panel was held at IRNOG4 dedicated to the "Women In Tech" subject.

In this part of the meeting, which was accompanied by numerous discussions, women active in the tech industry expressed their concerns in this field. The panelists and audience discussed reasons for low participation of women in IRNOG meetings and technical presentations.

These conversations continued after the conference. In the days following the event, IRNOG community members continued discussing the matter in the Telegram group.

Closing

In the closing session, the audience applauded the PC team, showing their appreciation for their ongoing efforts over the past six years to make sure IRNOG events keep happening and experts keep coming together to discuss these topics and issues.

If you would like to find out more about IRNOG4, please refer to the website and follow #IRNOG4 hashtag on Twitter.