NANOG
acronymeventsISP & telecomnetworking
Stands for: North American Network Operators' Group - the operators' town hall since 1994
The North American Network Operators' Group: the town hall where the people who actually run the internet compare notes - three meetings a year and one legendary mailing list, since 1994.
NANOG grew out of the NSFNET era's regional-techs meetings and kept that founding character: operators presenting to operators about routing incidents, peering, DDoS weather, and the operational truth behind the marketing. The mailing list is an institution in its own right - decades of outage post-mortems and blunt engineering argument - and the term hallway track might as well have been coined for its corridors, where peering deals are struck over coffee. Regional siblings worldwide (Brazil's GTS/GTER plays the same role at home, LACNOG for the region) share the model: no vendor keynotes at the center, just the network, as operated.
Also known as: nanog, network operators group, hallway track