Author: Richard Patterson

⚠️ DAY & DATE CHANGE ⚠️

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

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Talk 1: It’s Always DNS

How swapping my home router broke my home automation and my wife’s investment app.

Presenter: David Groves (Nominet)

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Talk 2: Persistent Unknown Unicast

Unknown unicast on shared peering LANs is widely assumed to be transient. This case study presents the opposite: a self-perpetuating mechanism via RFC 4861 §7.3.1 forward-progress confirmation, where a single MAC change can leave a stale neighbour entry REACHABLE indefinitely while customer traffic — HTTPS SNI, signalling, residential 999 calls — is flooded to hundreds of member ports. A reproducible demonstration was published in November 2024. The talk presents the mechanism at the kernel and protocol level, a five-year timeline of reports and partial remediations at one IXP, the categories of disclosure and safety-of-life exposure at stake, and operational lessons for IXP operators and members. It closes on the speaker’s open self-examination: did I do enough on behalf of my customers?

Presenter: James Rice (Jump Networks Ltd)

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

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Talk 1: Lightning Talks (maybe)

Any ad-hoc lightning talks present on the night. Please reach out if you would like to give one, no slideware necessary.

Presenter: You?

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Talk 2: Social

Extended social time

Presenter: None

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

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Talk 1: Scalable oversubscribed secure-by-default architecture using vendor-agnostic pure networking techniques

Join us for an interactive session that showcases a Telecoms Security Act compliant uk-wide aggregation network which isolates both unicast and BUM traffic down to the switchport level by default with a minimum amount of per-service config, using a uniquely optimised mix of vendor-agnostic pure networking techniques from both the ISP and DC spaces.

Presenter: Chris Gardner (Bestpath)

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Talk 2: Do network paths lie? A look into BGP vs Traceroute disagreements

A lot of the time we are building our network policy configuration out of the understanding that the underlying routing data we are being provided is not being tampered with, however how often is that actually true? How often does the path that is presented to us over BGP actually reflect the path that is measurable once we actually accept that route? In this presentation I will use the data that bgp.tools has on the wider internet routing table (IE the BGP control plane) and cross check that data against real world trace route data measurements to see how often the paths are misleading us, either maliciously or not.

Presenter: Ben Cartwright-Cox (BGP.tools)

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

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Talk 1: The Problems with RTBH

A recent large scale DDoS attack against one of our customers revealed some problems with our exiting RTBH tooling. This talk aims to provide an insight into the problems with RTBH filtering from both sides of the table (as an IP Transit and DDoS protection provider, and as a customer/peer), and some ideas of what we as a community can do about it.

Presenter: James Bensley (Inter.link)

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Talk 2: Building an open source BNG

Small insight into DPDK, VPP and eBPF/XDP. How I started building a software based BNG with the goal of being able to serve IPoE and PPPoE subscribers and get up to multi-hundred gigabits of throughput, how I can move forward with getting the ISP community to try it out in labs and get to a production-grade BNG on x86 hardware

Presenter: Brandon Spendlove (veesix ::networks)

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

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Talk 1: The realities of multi-cloud networking, security integration, and automation at scale

This session explores the real-world challenges and solutions of adopting multi-cloud networking at scale. We’ll cover how to integrate security seamlessly, automate operations across diverse environments, and build a foundation that balances agility, resilience, and control. Expect practical insights on connecting clouds, securing workloads, and simplifying operations for modern enterprises.

Presenter: Chris Noon (Alkira)

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Talk 2: WISP Diaries Ep 3 – Changing the engine mid-flight

A quick insight into how to rebuild a wireless POP during a working day with negligible downtime.

Presenter: Oli Stockman (Fram Broadband)

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks Partying begins promptly also at 1830hrs

End-of-Year Party

Join us for an end-of-year social co-hosted with our friends from LONAP.

&

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

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Talk 1: Latency based routing

Eutelsat OneWeb routing using flex algo latency based. Motivation and deployment.

Presenter: Catalin Petrescu (Eutelsat OneWeb)

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Talk 2: Owning the automation stack with Infrahub

A journey, the challenges and experience using the newest SOT on market: Infrahub

Presenter: Mufaddal Presswala

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

---

Talk 1: WISP Diaries Ep 3 – Changing the engine mid-flight

A quick insight into how to rebuild a wireless POP during a working day with negligible downtime.

Presenter: Oli Stockman (Fram Broadband)

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Talk 2: Meter’s Approach: Unpacking Our Services and Network Hardware

This overview will detail how Meter delivers internet infrastructure as a utility. We’ll explore the services we provide and delve into the sophisticated hardware that forms the backbone of our reliable and secure network solutions.

Presenter: Erik Wooding (Meter)

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

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Talk 1: AI Vibes with Panny

An exploration of frontier AI models, the Deepseek disruption, and why running AI locally matters. Live coding demos, practical tools for local models, and a look at where AI coding is heading.

Join Panny for an exploration of what’s happening in AI right now. We’ll start with live coding demonstrations using multiple AI assistants working simultaneously, then discuss the recent Deepseek moment that sent tech stocks tumbling. The talk covers why local AI matters (spoiler: access and control), tools for running open source models on your own hardware, and a look at the latest AI coding assistants. Whether you’re AI-curious or already deep in the stack, come learn about the current state of frontier models and practical tools you can use today.

Presenter: Panny Malialis (Star London)

Download: Night Rider’s Mark.html

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Talk 2: TBD

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Presenter: You?

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.

Henry’s Den, Downstairs @ Finch’s
12a Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AN

Arrival from 1830hrs. 
Talks begin promptly at 1900hrs.

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Talk 1: Building Trustworthy Network Automation, From Principles to Practice

Trust is essential for successful network automation adoption.

When automation platforms exhibit predictable behaviors and transparent processes, teams can confidently delegate critical network operations. Building trustworthy automation doesn’t happen by itself, it needs to be baked into the design of every workflows.

This technical session examines core principles that build trust, including idempotency, declarative workflows, and robust version control. Using practical examples from production environments, we’ll analyze how specific technical decisions affect automation reliability and team confidence. The presentation covers key implementation patterns like state verification, diff-based changes, and failure handling. Attendees will learn concrete approaches for building automation platforms that network teams can trust and rely on daily.

Presenter: Damien Garros (OpsMill)

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Talk 2: Building an open source network automation system with Nautobot

Building network automation systems using open-source tools makes automation more accessible to a wider audience, reducing barriers to adoption and enabling more flexible, adaptable solutions.

A composable, open-source automation system relies on several key components working together effectively. In this talk, I’ll explain what those components are, why they matter, and how Nautobot provides a strong foundation for building such a system.

Drawing from my experience, I’ll outline the essential building blocks—including data models, configuration management, validation, and integration with other automation tools—and explain how Nautobot’s extensibility enables it to fit seamlessly within a network automation system.

Presenter: Johan van den Dorpe (VDL Tech)

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After Talks: Networking for Networkers

Stay around after the talks for a social hour.