APRICOT 2007 Officially Opened Yesterday

Even though the workshop and tutorial of APRICOT 2007 in Bali has been starting since mid of last week, the conference was only officially opened yesterday (Tuesday, 27 February 2007). The conference was officially opened by Mr. Sofyan Djalil, the Minister of Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of Indonesia, after the opening speeches given by Ms. Sylvia Sumarlin, the chairman of APJII, the Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association, and Mr. Gaurab Uphadaya, the chairman of APIA. APJII and APIA are two out of several organisations which support the APRICOT 2007 event.

Yesterday morning, I attended the BGP Deployment and Best Practices tutorial, conducted by Philip Smith. During lunch time yesterday, I had the chance to meet Mr. Sanjaya, one of APJII's activists who is now working for APNIC, and Mr. Roy Rahajasa Yamin, my ex-boss in RADNET. During the plenary session, I also met Mr. Yulianus, the network administrator of Indosat, one of the leading ISPs in Indonesia.

Yesterday night, I attended the APRICOT Opening Social Event, which is held at the Westin Poolside. I met some friends from Starhub and Equinix, Singapore. I also met Mr. Toto Santoso, the administrator of Ipteknet/BPPT and also previously the administrator for the go.id second level domain. We discussed almost anything reminiscing and Bill Fridini also joined the discussion. It was fun.

Today (Wednesday, 28 February 2007) morning, I attended the second phase of the APRICOT plenary sessions at the auditorium, with some interesting presentations, such as the new 4-byte (32-bit) AS number testing by Geoff Huston, and bogon filters discussion by Randy Bush. During lunch time, I met Judhi Prasetyo, one of my friends in Singapore. His company, FortiNet, is having a booth here in APRICOT 2007 and is one of the sponsors for the event. He also introduced me to Valens Riyadi, one of APRICOT's organising committee members.

I'm now writing this article from the Nusantara 2 Room, attending the IX SIG, chaired by Philip Smith. There are some interesting presentations, one of them is regarding the new 100 Gigabit Ethernet technology, by Greg Hankins from IEEE. Currently, there's also a presentation regarding Euro-IX, which is actually a European IXP association, and *not* a European IX point by itself. Very interesting. This might be due to the fact that there are many (and not only one) IX points in Europe.

I won't post any more pictures here, you can go to my Flickr site if you want to see photos during the event. Specifically, these are the locations of the photos during my first day in APRICOT 2007 (26 February 2007) and during my second day (27 February 2007) here. I haven't uploaded any photos from today's events, will do soon, please watch out for them here.