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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!
Read the article before posting to keep yourself from looking like an idiot next time.
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.
SHUT UP.
You might give him ideas.
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.
Can't wait until Micheal Bay directs a movie about this...
Why? Are there massive explosions and car chases when you configure your AP? If so, you might be doing it wrong.
Or very very right, depending on how you look at it. Seriously, if you can get your AP to explode, literally, just by configuring it, I would be impressed.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
" 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.
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
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
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.