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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!
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
It was just for one guest who realized he had great wifi reception on his bathroom ceiling and used the nexus S to bluetooth tether to his laptop.
Read the article before posting to keep yourself from looking like an idiot next time.
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 should look at the price of Cisco AP's - you can easily pay more than the price of an unlocked Nexus for a single AP. (but it's a lot more capable as an AP than the phone)
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)
Or maybe the summarirs could actually summarize the article instead of doing shitty local news teases?
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.
I don't know if what they did qualifies as jury-rigged. They basically mapped out the entire network and assigned RF channels and power levels so that adjacent floors would not interfere with each other. Seems like whoever installed it before just threw up an access point in every other room and left it on full power. What the IETF guys are doing is certainly not totally optimized yet but it's a big improvement over what was there before.
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!
Or.. maybe you could RTFA. The summaries are to give enough information to let you decide if you are interested in reading the article. If the summary is going to cover every single detail, they may as well just paste the entire article in the summary section, and do away with the links.
Because they are a Hotel, and don't give a shit if their network is flaky. They have been using Microsoft products for more than a decade, so when things sometimes work and sometimes don't, then that is just them darn computers behaving flaky as always.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You know those 802.11 wireless standards implemented in just about every wireless network device in the world? These guys wrote them. Literally. Rest assured they understand what they're doing.
You have a point about future support, but characterizing them as just a bunch of guys with badges who barely have a clue makes you seem ignorant.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
You know, you could have politely pointed out my error like yincrash did above, but chose not to. Now I'm going to have to get medieval on your ass. When dealing with the pain, please remember you brought this on yourself.
Whilst thine contention that I readeth not the article is in good sooth, thine attitude lacketh charm and grace.
Prithee consider the comeliness of thine words, lest good folk consider thee knavish.
Thou art an embossed carbuncle.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
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...
That is what they did.. but as we all know.. while it's not rocket science.. there are a lot of "network consulting firm"s that can't do it.
and while some of it was guessing - remember that this isn't "their" network.. and they had no working set to start with and no idea where some of these AP's where.. and again.. it wasn't their job or reason for being there.
in hind site they might want to think about going the way of defcon and bring in their own network to their next get together.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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"?
No, these guys are really, really good. They know what they are doing, and have been doing it, successfully, for several years. For several years before that, we didn't do so well. These guys have all the tools, and mostly, the experience. They can do it quick, and work within the constraints of the existing system. A regular network consulting company would take a couple of weeks, do a poorer job, insist a lot of new equipment is needed and charge an arm and a leg, which is why the hotel didn't do it. In a few hours they mapped the network, analyzed the configuration, designed a new plan, deployed it, tested it, and made it work. They did it on a product line they had not dealt with before. It was very impressive.
The actual fun issue is: they logged all the original state. They have a tool that maintains the entire configuration. They can leave it in one of two conditions: exactly the way it was before they changed everything, or in the state it is now. The hotel can make that choice.
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 wish I could mod you up because the parent definitely seems to be significantly ignorant, rofl.
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
That has to be the most literal interpretation of "get medieval" I've seen anywhere.
Pray, sir, that you may accepteth my earnest compliments on thine craft of the Anglo script!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
These IETF dudes sound like the A-Team of IT. They just roll into town, unfuck the network, and are gone just as mysteriously.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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."
"thine contention" / "thine attitude" / "thine words" - should all be "thy"
"thy" = "your", "thine" = "yours"
"I readeth not" = wrong tense, I think you want "I didst not read"
- archaic grammar nazi
These IETF dudes sound like the A-Team of IT. They just roll into town, unfuck the network, and are gone just as mysteriously.
I wish they'd roll into ICANN and do the same.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 'Internet' hasn't been around for 83 years. So, how many meetings per year are needed?
In the early days, it was less regimented, and sometimes as frequently as 4 times a year. For the past few decades, it's been a pretty steady spring/summer/fall meeting schedule.
We will remove the connection to their uplink, so performance will go down when we leave. However, they are keeping our configuration changes, so I expect the performance to still be significantly better than it was before we arrived.
Chris.
in hind site they might want to think about going the way of defcon and bring in their own network to their next get together.
We do. However, most of the time that gear is used for the convention center and not for the hotel. This time we deployed 50 Cisco 1200 APs, 11 24-48-port switches, 9 smaller 8-port switches (mainly for rooms needing multiple wired connections), and two Juniper routers, each connected to a 1Gbps uplink using different paths to the rest of the Internet.
We did consider deploying some of our leftover APs (some 20 more 1200s, and some 1131s that we only use for outlying areas) in the hotel, but there really wasn't time, nor was it practical due to the number of floors (33) and the number of access points already on each floor (10). In Taipei we deployed around 20 APs in the main hotel. Each venue is unique.
Chris.
We tried. We sent in one of our best:
http://cavebear.com/index.php?option=com_bookmarks&Itemid=67&mode=2&catid=-1&navstart=0
Search for ICANN.
Chris.
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.
I was on vacation in Hawaii on the big island in probably `94 or before and fixed the network at the Volcano Arts Center. The director gave me a nice discount for anything at the center and we ended up going to a mutual friend's house, where they fixed us a traditional Hawaiian dinner. I also had to hack my Pentax MX camera when the shutter button fell off while we were on top of Puu Oo looking down into the most breathtaking view I've seen.
Awesome vacation. And, no, not unusual, for this crowd.
Chris.
I fully understand that each venue is unique but to come into something like this - and have that many professionals unable to do their jobs, should be considered unacceptable especially for this group of people.
The only real way to avoid this problem is in planning, I understand you plan on the convention center, but you should also plan on the logging. (i made the assumption in my first comment that the conference was being held at at the same place as logging (30+ floor hotels normally can handle conferences of that size)
In the future you should plan ahead for this, not so much in bringing your own hardware (only if you have to) but rather ensure that the venue you select can actually support what you are doing, in this case it couldn't.
Everyone seems to love fixing on the fly, firefighting is glorious, but in reality planners are the people that make things happen. and we are only reading about this because of the failure of planning.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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.
Sorry, but I don't think you understand. Planning for IETF meetings now start 3 years in advance. We send people to every hotel months before the meeting, specifically to check out the network. We always ask for permission to modify the hotel network (and, generally we get it). (We just went through a long involved process to convince a future hotel of the benefits of doing this.) The NOC team moves into the hotel a full week before the meeting to set this up. But, even with all of this, shit happens. The IETF stresses really stresses the network, and has a history of uncovering problems.
Commenting to undo accidental "overrated" mod (meant funny). Also, I love the word "unfuck".
weinersmith
That sounds great - but what is seemingly described here does not reflect what you just said. I understand "shit happens" but what is described here (having to re-config it on the fly without knowing where things are) shows a lack of planning, particularly proper scoping of the facility ahead of arrival.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Fascinating reading, thanks. It confirms my knowledge of the situation adding much interesting color. However, I can't see any dates in there later than 2003. Might it not be time to revisit the issue, perhaps with more than one guy's efforts (bright and insightful though he may be)?
FYI, this (bottom of the page) doesn't exist. I'll see if I can find it at EFF (they probably moved it in the interim).
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit