A great deal of Indian Country often lacks internet access, and often, connectivity solutions fall on the shoulders of Tribal community members.

For the past two years, Tribal Broadband Bootcamps (TBB), co-founded by Matt Rantanen and Christopher Mitchell and now hosted at the Indigenous Connectivity Institute at Connect Humanity, have worked with 35 Tribes and more than 200 participants to date. I’ve been fortunate enough to connect and learn from this group that supports experiential opportunities for Tribal members to build, maintain, and troubleshoot nontraditional networks and wireless networks in Indian Country.

Read the full article here.

ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) is a high-performance network backbone built to support scientific research. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and part of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides fast, reliable connections between national laboratories, supercomputing facilities, and scientific instruments around the globe. Our mission is to allow scientists to collaborate and perform research without worrying about distance or location.

In order to achieve that mission, we need to make sure our network is running as smoothly as possible. A key piece of this is collecting a wide range of telemetry about our network. Since science is an end-to-end process that crosses many networks, we also participate in multiple external collaborations, such as NetSage and perfSONAR, to make sure other networks have the tools they need to perform this collection as well.

Grafana plays an important role in visualizing and understanding the data we collect both internally and as part of our collaborative efforts. Specifically, we use Grafana as the visualization component within our Stardust Environment. Stardust measures network activity and usage giving us a window into network traffic, scientific data transfer activity, and more. This allows us to do things like predict capacity needs and easily view traffic surges on our infrastructure. While Grafana includes a lot of pre-built panel plugins that are great for visualization, it is also an extensible architecture that allows us to create custom visualizations tailored to our network analytic use cases.

Read the full article here.

Internet2 has a new blog series that spotlights R&E community members and organizations who are moving the needle on routing integrity by implementing best practices and capabilities – and supporting their constituents in doing the same. Among those organizations is Front Range GigaPoP (FRGP), which is featured this month.

Among those organizations is Front Range GigaPoP (FRGP), which is managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). The FRGP connects Colorado and Wyoming with hundreds of gigabits to the Internet2 national network via the Western Regional Network (WRN) partnership to advance the R&E goals of government, nonprofit, research, and educational participants in the region.

In this Q&A, John Hernandez, network engineering supervisor at UCAR and assistant manager for the FRGP, discusses the FRGP’s initiative to encourage all its members to participate in the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) effort to better secure members’ IP resources. He shares the challenges and opportunities driving that effort, along with the progress they’ve made and lessons they’ve learned thus far.

Read the full Q&A here.