Great dinner last night, enormous steak at some place called Birks (sic) with twenty of the other SunPS, ES, and other miscellaneous ESTC people, and that great hyperactive ferret of network love Dan tagged along too.

I shall spare you from tales of the anguish of participating in focus groups – the team was great, actually, as was the argument and debate, but the whole experience was rather spoiled by the group logistics that kept on trying to shoehorn our discussion to fit preconceived expectations of what we should produce.

I got back to the hotel and was given a very nifty demo of the IPSec tunneling-into-SWAN experiment by DanMc, with which I was very impressed. We hypothesised a few potential failure conditions – stuff that depends upon badly configured or administered endpoints – but no actual obvious bugs in the architecture.

To be rolled-out will put a significant burden of responsibility upon the users – which is probably the biggest challenge / issue / problem – but which impacts all solutions of that sort, to varying extent.

I got to look at and play with Geoff’s iBook running BSD, and was surprised how much of the BSD was exposed; the idea of a consumer device which ships with EMACS is something I find appealing. I may get one – I need a new CPU at home.

Another focus group this morning, and things are wrapping up as I write. Soon off to have lunch with Whit, tea with Michaele, and dinner with the security mob.