First Hackday

The members of DD-IX have very different technical backgrounds. In order to bring all people to the same level and to promote young talent, we have made it our task to raise our own young technical talent.

Exactly out of this interest, the first DD-IX Hackday on the topic of "Routing" already took place. (Workshops, so-called Hackdays, are used by the DD-IX as a kind of training for all interested members).

The aim of this day was to bring the participants to the same level of knowledge and to understand what we do as an IXP (Internet Exchange Point). Thomas Liske organized an excellent structured workshop, which was easy to understand even without much previous knowledge of network technology.

At the beginning, the attendees were divided into teams, which then took care of a pod together. These pods represented a kind of ISP on a small scale. For this purpose, each team was given an overview in advance with the IP address ranges and logins to be used, so that communication in and between the pods could run smoothly. In this way, the individual pods acquired their knowledge on the topic of "routing" at their own speed with a mixture of lecture and independent experiments. This created a very pleasant and open working atmosphere in which helpfulness and thirst for knowledge could be felt.

We then continued with the topic "Provider Networks". Here we deepened our knowledge about the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) and the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP). These are classes of routing protocols that are used to exchange information within or between autonomous systems.

The last item on the agenda of the first Hackday was the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the routing protocol used on the Internet. With the help of BGP, routers communicate with each other. All peerings in an Internet Exchange Point like the DD-IX use BGP, so a lot of attention should be paid to this topic in any case.

A successful Hackday could be seen on the exhausted but satisfied participants. Everyone was able to take away a lot of new knowledge from this day and deepen already existing knowledge.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Thomas for organizing this day. He invested a lot of time and energy in providing us with the necessary hardware, as well as a great presentation. Without him, the first Hackday would not have been possible in its complexity and success.

We are looking forward to many more Hackdays!