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IETF Attendees Reengineer Their Hotel's Wi-Fi Net
alphadogg writes "What happens when a bunch of IETF super nerds show up in Paris for a major conference and discover their hotel's Wi-Fi network has imploded? They give it an Extreme Wi-Fi Makeover. Members of the Internet Engineering Task Force, who gathered for the outfit's 83rd meeting this week in France, discovered as they arrived at the Hotel Concorde Lafayette that the Wi-Fi was flakey and became flakier still as scores more attendees arrived and tried to connect, and the wired net was having issues of its own. Working behind the scenes, a team of IETF attendees negotiated with the hotel and were granted access to the wireless network, and began rigging up all sorts of fixes, which even included taping a Nexus S phone to a ceiling and turning off the radios on numerous access points to reduce noise."
Someone please explain the usefulness of taping a phone to the ceiling to me.
Nerds get together and do nerdy stuff en masse!
I am a fan of the samsung line of android smartphones, but using a high-end smartphone is one of the most expensive options for a wifi router that I've ever heard of.
I don't see many hotels running with that solution.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Can't wait until Micheal Bay directs a movie about this.
IETF Agents struggle to defend paris against an onsluaght of transforming alien turtles and explosions
Where the fucking network kludges I have to unfuck come from. FOSS-tard dumb asses.
So these nerds Jury Rigged the WiFi in the motel, and when they are gone, the whole network collapses.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
The Wi-Fi at my hotel for GDC last month was unusable. These places need to step it up if they're going to partner with tech-oriented conferences like these.
I have been in hotels with a cable co wifi modem in the room (good as I needed to reboot it aka unplug and replug to get it working)
Engineering might be putting that a bit kindly. This isn't really engineering... What these guys did sounds like flailing around using educated guesses --- oh, wait.
Currently hooked on AMP
Can somebody explain to me why did these guys go to this conference? In my experience there are two reasons to go to a conference:
1. Business - meet people learn new things
2. Pleasure - screw the talks and go skying
This conference is in Paris of all places and if they don't care about the place and the talks why the hell did they go there. I am pretty sure every single one of the participants has better internet connection at home.
The article made it seem like they re-designed the network. I mean if this is the best IETF can muster, then that is just plain sad... All they appeared to do was reduce broadcast sensitivity, and forced channel selection. Heck, they didn't even use basic tools that any network technician would have on his truck for doing basic diagnosis. WOW!! AMAZING WORK "SUPER GEEKS" !!!!
Suggestion to the Hotel... Instead of relying on a bunch of guys with flashy badges talking endlessly about how smart they are, why not just hire a network consulting firm to do a generic network topography and build out the network correctly? The stuff is not rocket science... And the best part that the company can actually support the setup later when you need support. I am guessing that will be a little difficult for a bunch of guys who "kind of" know what they are talking about..
I like what I've read in the article so far. One of the mantras of ham radio is use as little power as possible to communicate. I love that these guys were smart enough to turn off some access points entirely, to reduce receiver sensitivity and transmitter power. It seems they reduced the number of access points to 3... one for each non-overlapping channel. Great!
You're right. There's absolutely *nothing* to see or do in Paris.
" they arrived at the toney Hotel Concorde Lafayette"
Do you mean "tony" as in "upscale and/or fashionable"?
The IETF basically re-engineers the Hotel's network every place they meet. The big difference is, sometimes they get permission to do this before the meeting, and sometimes (as here in Paris), they don't get this permission until after the Hotel's network melts down.
(By the way, I am at the meeting, and I heard that the Hotel's IT head has now been fired. This is not too surprising when one of the major fixes was to turn off
the majority of the access points.)
I would so watch that show! Every week, they take us to a company to look over their pathetic network and re-do it properly and with moar power. I can see it now...the teary-eyed IT manager is brought in to see his new network...it'd be like Bob Vila for geeks.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I recently stayed in some hotels in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia - Hotel Istana, Park Royal to name a few. The wifi was perfect in all areas of the room, in the buffet area and most areas of the lobby. I'm highlighting this so that people don't think all hotels suffer this problem.
When I was at breakfast, many people had laptops and smart phones, so there was a fair amount of taxing of wifi bandwidth. I recall a few couples streaming video over the web, which sounded fine (I couldn't see the image).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 'Internet' hasn't been around for 83 years. So, how many meetings per year are needed?
a team of IETF engineers who were granted access to the Hotel Concorde Lafayette's Wi-Fi network received complementary hookers and champagne, and had all of their room charges dropped. Some of the hookers who could be reached for comment called the IETF engineers "extraordinarily poor tippers".
"Let's go find some Turian and beat the shit out of him
Nobody ever got fired for listening to a vendor. They all have your needs and best interest at heart when they quote you the bare minimum you absolutely need to buy.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The changes made by the IETF makeover team included:
- Decreasing the AP receiver sensitivity ([changing] HP/Colubris configuration "distance" from "large" to "small");
- Increasing the minimum data and multicast rate from 1Mbps to 2Mbps;
- Decreasing the transmit power from 20dBm to 10dBm;
- And, turning off the radios on numerous APs to reduce the [RF] noise.
"In the process, we've hacked netdisco [a network management tool that maps MAC addresses to IP addresses to pinpoint switch ports] to be able to discover the hotel infrastructure and rancid [a free tool that monitors a device's configurations and maintains a history of changes in a Concurrent Version System (CVS) repository] to be able to at least minimally work with HP/Colubris APs, and added their private subnet to our management station to facilitate discovery, scripted changes, and monitoring," Elliott wrote, describing something close to a NOC trouble-shooting system put together on the fly.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Only horse thieves and bootleggers from Missoura wear the yellow ones.
In my early days of contracting I was staying at a cheap hotel where the owner lost his system and the back-ups. I negotiated payment in beer and did a forensic recovery.....
Doesn't everybody?
I spent much of last Friday (before the IETF meeting started) tying the hotel wireless infrastructure to our dual gig uplinks in the convention center. An amusing part of this was that to find the fiber that went between the convention center and the hotel required us to dig out our own documentation from when we used this facility in 2005. One page allowed us to locate where the fiber terminated in the conference center--a room on the roof of the center. We then had to get one of the conference staff to climb into the equipment cage as they never used it and had lost the key.
Imagine using an elevator that required calling security to enable it to go to the top floor, winding around and ducking under giant HVAC equipment in a dust-covered room, and turning on the lights to see a 8-foot high equipment cage. Imagine the staff member using a pallet as a stepping stone to get into said cage. Imagine that the lights are on a timer and go off automatically in 5 minutes, leaving said staff member to try to climb out in the dark. Fortunately, I was there, outside the cage.
It's always interesting when we know things about the facility that the staff doesn't.
That said, both the convention center and the hotel staff have been great to work with, the key has been found--and no one has been fired, as far as I know. Certainly the same folks I've been dealing with are still employed here.
Chris.
If you have an Android device, Wifi Analyzer will do a pretty decent job showing you what's on each channel and what the crossband interference might look like.
Using CyanogenMOD, I also quite often set my phone up as an HSDPA-wifi, HSDPA-USB, or even wifi-usb tether, depending on my situation... and it usually works much better than whatever lousy wifi access point I might encounter in public.