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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.
Or maybe the summarirs could actually summarize the article instead of doing shitty local news teases?
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.
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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.
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You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
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.
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These IETF dudes sound like the A-Team of IT. They just roll into town, unfuck the network, and are gone just as mysteriously.
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