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.

First day at APRICOT 2007

Although today (Monday, 26 February 2007) is my first day at this APRICOT 2007 conference, it's actually already the sixth day of the conference, since I skipped the workshop and some of the meetings which are not related to my organisation. This conference is being held at the Bali International Convention Centre, which is quite a good, world class convention centre, similar to the Suntec City Convention Centre in Singapore. It's located within the complex of Westin Resort hotel, about 5-10 minutes from Melia Bali Hotel where I'm staying. There's a shuttle bus ferrying all the delegates from hotel to the conference venue.

Earlier, during lunch session, I met Mauldi Wirastomo and Bill Fridini, both are my old friends from APJII. They are now very busy since they are in-charge of the network providing Internet access to all the delegates. I also had the chance to meet Ahmad Alkazimy, one of APJII's key technical staff whom I previously only knew from his e-mails in some mailing lists. I also met Deny Kurniawan and I Nyoman Tusta, two of my old friends from RADNET Surabaya.

There are some tutorials which we can choose to attend, based on their streams. For today, I attended the Introduction to IPv6 tutorial by Jordi Palet Martinez, and IPv6 Deployment tutorial by Salaman Asadullah. There's free Internet access provided through wi-fi (wireless) networks, and power plugs are also available in the tables, so we can use our laptop and access the Internet while attending the tutorials. Unfortunately, the Internet access is a bit slow, although, according to Mauldi, there's more than 28 Mbps of bandwidth available. I guess it might be due to more people are using the network this week compared to last week.

More pictures during the event can be found here.

[Indonesian version]