wifi during conference

[Brandon Wilson]

I'm not staying at the hotel and I was wondering if there is wifi during the conference?

[Robert Casto]

Yes, pretty good so far. But the attendance will be double tomorrow so we shall see.

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 3:48 PM, Brandon Wilson <exd...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm not staying at the hotel and I was wondering if there is wifi during the conference?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CodeMash" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to codemash+u...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to code...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/codemash.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--
Robert Casto
www.robertcasto.com
www.sellerstoolbox.com

www.lakotaeastbands.org

[Brandon Wilson]

Thanks Robert, I have backup but I only wanted to use it as a backup.

---
Brandon Wilson
Nyne Axis  
Software Developer
www.nyneaxis.com 
740-229-9170

[Robert Casto]

I do tethering on my cell phone as backup. That works well but only because I have Verizon.

[Joshua Minnie]

Yes, CodeMash has it’s own WiFi group.

Joshua Minnie

m...@joshuaminnie.com

(616) 827-7626

(616) 283-7464 (mobile)

---

From: Brandon Wilson Brandon Wilson
Reply: code...@googlegroups.com code...@googlegroups.com
Date: January 8, 2014 at 3:48:44 PM
To: code...@googlegroups.com code...@googlegroups.com
Subject:  [CodeMash] wifi during conference

I'm not staying at the hotel and I was wondering if there is wifi during the conference?

[Michael Knisely]

How'd the wifi treat you Thursday and so far on Friday?

[Brandon Wilson]

It was good. I had a few issues where I had to restart my computer a few times. Overall it was good.

---
Brandon Wilson
Software Developer
740-229-9170
www.nyneaxis.com

[Mark D. Chamberlain]

In specific comparison to prior years, I'd say the Kalahari nailed it.

[Robert Casto]

For me the first day was pretty rocky. Not sure why though so I'm chalking it up to the laptop. After a reboot, had no problems anywhere during the conference.

[M. Knisely]

I'm very glad to hear that.  I know they wanted nothing short of a stellar experience for you all and really pulled out all the stops to over-scale where needed to ensure you had a great time. 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "CodeMash" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/codemash/ne-006pN6Mw/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to codemash+u...@googlegroups.com.

[Faye Thompson]

A few blips on Thursday, but I rebooted and had no issues after that.  Otherwise, connectivity was far better than any other conference I've ever attended.  For some reason, this is something that most business centers just don't do well.

 

 

 

On Wednesday, January 8, 2014 3:48:43 PM UTC-5, Brandon Wilson wrote:

 

[Don Miller]

It was the best Wifi experience I have ever had at a conference before.  Well done!

Don

[Robert Casto]

If we cannot break it, then Kalahari has something to brag about to other customers.

[M. Knisely]

Well said.  Honestly, for most Business Centers, WiFi is a loss for them.  Most of the time it sits unused.  It's only the really BIG events that test the solution, and most places aren't willing to spend the money to build a truly scaleable solution for those few events.

Let's take a look at what happened last year.  Thousands of users, and some with their families, descended on the network and attached between 3-5 devices per family to the wifi network.  Users fired up torrents, ran online backups, streamed live to uStream, uploaded YouTube videos, pushed thousands of hi-res images to social media, and all other sorts of fun bandwidth hungry tasks.  There were so many wireless devices that DHCP scopes were exhausted and the ARP table on a firewall overflowed.  All of this on a network that was scaled beyond most conference centers I've had a pleasure to work in.

Once the wifi started experiencing issues, attendees started firing up their own wifi hotspots which added to a saturation of RF in the 2.4Ghz spectrum exacerbating an already frustrating wifi experience.  It was truly a cascading series of issues that all added up to a poor experience.

The methodology they employed this year was to try to make the wifi experience so good, nobody would even consider firing up their own hotspot.  The internet pipe for the event was pushed to 200Mb/s and bandwidth hungry applications were limited but not entirely blocked.  This made sure that users would have an excellence browsing experience while still able to accomplish the background tasks like backups too.

The Internet data path was also upgraded to accommodate the 200Mb/s Internet connection for the event.  Even though this pipe upgrade was only for the event, all routers, firewalls, filters, and switchs in the Internet data path had to be able to handle the 200Mb/s of continuous throughput.

I believe Mark Chamberlain summed it up best above... Kalahari nailed it.  

Also, I would say that if you felt the experience was a success, you might also make it a point to let the CodeMash organizers know.  They want to make sure that you feel value for your dues in the organization.

Thanks for a great event, and I look forward to seeing you all again next year!

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 9:11 AM, Faye Thompson <thomps...@gmail.com> wrote:

A few blips on Thursday, but I rebooted and had no issues after that.  Otherwise, connectivity was far better than any other conference I've ever attended.  For some reason, this is something that most business centers just don't do well.

 

 

 

On Wednesday, January 8, 2014 3:48:43 PM UTC-5, Brandon Wilson wrote:

 

[Jason Follas]

Michael, 

It's as if you were a fly on the wall during our kickoff meeting!  Every detail that you mention is spot on.

The Kalahari is proud of their accomplishment this year (as they should be!).  They will be taking the lessons learned from this year's experience and applying it to their other properties (read: ThatConference should have a lot better network this year, too).

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CodeMash" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to codemash+u...@googlegroups.com.

[david.wickman]

I was not impressed with the wifi. Speed tests said ~50down/50up, but throttled to death.

For example, in the precompiler, I was in the full day iOS workshop and didn't have the latest Xcode. With these speeds, it shouldn't take too long to knock out this download, but 17hours?Here's a link to the tweet and screenshot - https://twitter.com/davidwickman/status/420917269913677824 Even at midnight, the throttling didn't ease up. https://twitter.com/davidwickman/status/421145121887748096

Before I get a response of 'this is way better than last year, we couldn't even connect', I want to say, I wasn't able to get in to CodeMash last year, but I was able to go to An Event Apart in Austin.
Sure the use of the network there may have been a bit different, but the speeds were much faster (http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3007143629) and no throttling like at CodeMash. I was able to upload and download all the files.

If you guys would like, I can try and get a hold of the guys from AEA and maybe see if we can implement their speeds for CodeMash2015.
Let me know if there is any way I could help out, just don't like being throttled :)

[M. Knisely]

LOL.... Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the kick-off meeting; though, I'd have loved to have been there.  I'm part of the external team that helped Matt and his crew fulfill their commitment to you.

Let me tell you this, failure was not an option.  Matt and his team, I think, did a fantastic job in evaluating last year and putting together a solid battle plan for this year.  Beyond that, he's already looking to what we can do next year to make things even better.

I think that CodeMash has a wonderful partner there with Kalahari.  Now, if you all could just figure out a way to control the weather we'll be all set!

Mike 

[Jason Follas]

David,

Pre-compiler is always a tricky time for the network, since many people like yourself don't have their development environments completely installed when the workshop begins. Speakers are supposed to provide Codemash with SDK install packages and whatnot before the conference so that they can be placed on an internal FTP server (instead of 100s of people trying to each download GBs of software at the same time from the Internet).  Xcode may be an outlier, due to licensing reasons.

The reality, though, is that we've learned from past experience that the only way for 2500+ people and 3500+ devices to share the bandwidth is to implement traffic shaping and throttling based on protocol and maybe server/domain.  So, for example, someone's Carbonite backup may still run, but all Carbonite traffic on the network might have to share a single 2MB partition of the total bandwidth. Likewise, Netflix traffic is throttled during the day, but is less throttled at night (think: families with children and iPads in their hotel rooms). Other traffic, like BitTorrent, just will not work if the router detects it as such.

In your case, your Xcode download was probably classified as one of the cases that needed to be throttled (maybe it was grouped in with iTunes traffic? Unsure of the exact rule that would have been in effect, but it was probably related to the same reason why downloads from the iOS app store were also slow).  You didn't see it improve after hours because the rule was in effect all of the time.  We can tweak scenarios like this in the future if we know about them (so thank you!).

Not that it helps now, but in your case where it was impeding the success of your workshop experience, we could have temporarily allowed your machine to bypass the rules in order to complete the download.  Just a tip for the future (on a case-by-case basis, not something that we can extend to hundreds of people at the same time, obviously).

-Jason

FWIW: The network monitoring charts showed us consuming 160MB of bandwidth most of the time.  So even with throttling and traffic shaping, the conference was still saturating the pipe.

[Robert Casto]

I think a local network server with software loaded from speakers would take care of that. The security talk I went to required a 2 GB download. And the room was full of over 100 people. No way was that going to be successful.

The important stuff worked. I could get my email, do chat, and deal with issues while I was away from the office. All of that worked flawlessly. I could help people as needed and not feel like the world was going to fall apart while being at the conference. Last year I had to stay in my hotel room just to get bandwidth so that I could get email.

I wonder if there is the ability for those who want mega bandwidth to pay for the option? If they really need it, then they could get it. And the conference wouldn't have to keep escalating available bandwidth to cover edge cases.

[gs volt]

I did passively wonder during codemash this year: 

"would replacing the ftp server with a torrent machine have been any faster"

In Sempf's talk I had to download the iso and it estimated time astronomically. I gave up ftp download, enjoyed the speech and shadowed other attendees' systems for demonstrations of attacks.

Bill did announce before Codemash on his blog that he intends to use the image, so I was kicking myself for not downloading it sooner.

Bittorrent usually works for me while pulling ISOs online at home of linux distributions, so I'd think in a conference setting it should be viable to deploy - distributed nature of the software could be leveraged, and there is no need to use public trackers as its local only at Kalahari. Heck network folks can carve out the torrent traffic vs the internet traffic as well - great possibilities!

I can't mock codemash's attendance - no way, but I am interested in ftp vs torrent comparisons. Once we settle in at synhak's new location (we're >90% moved), I might mock this out and share results. Would be good use of our older systems at the space.

ref: http://www.rarst.net/software/torrent-deploy-files/

Regards,

-- 

G | Gaurav Narain Saxena | (330) 283 - 4972

I am a Board Member at SYN/HAK: The Akron Hackerspace located at 48 S Summit St Akron Ohio 44308 

I am providing technical consulting services to Sherwin-Williams on behalf of Bennett Adelson (Microsoft Solution Center) located at 6050 Oak Tree Blvd, Cleveland, Ohio 44131

I have also been providing solutions to non-trivial problems other businesses may have through my company Whiskey Bits LLC located in Portage Lakes, Ohio

Learn more about things I have created by reading my About page on my blog

[Jason Follas]

I think charging for premium network connectivity is a non-starter for now.  Coordination, SLAs, price...  My feeling is that the network configuration next year will very much resemble this year's.

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 4:22 PM, Robert Casto <casto....@gmail.com> wrote:

[Jason Follas]

BitTorrent has a lot of merit as a distribution platform, yes.  I'm a huge fan of distributed downloading (versus from a single point).

But, there's no way for us to distinguish "legit" content being torrented (like Linux ISOs or SDKs needed for a precompiler) from nefarious usage, therefore we're forced to adopt a "No Torrent" policy in the interest of conserving bandwidth for other verifiable usage.

[Nayan Hajratwala]

> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Jason Follas <jfo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> David,
>
> Pre-compiler is always a tricky time for the network, since many people like yourself don't have their development environments completely installed when the workshop begins. Speakers are supposed to provide Codemash with SDK install packages and whatnot before the conference so that they can be placed on an internal FTP server (instead of 100s of people trying to each download GBs of software at the same time from the Internet). Xcode may be an outlier, due to licensing reasons.

Before codemash, I took a look to see if any of the precompilers I was interested in required downloads. I turns out that most of the presenters had posted on this list indicating what was needed. If they did, I went ahead and downloaded them.

I only ended up needing one of the downloads, but I was prepared for the others without sucking up the bandwidth.

As such, I experienced little to no problems with the network.

I think I will follow this “plan ahead” strategy again next year. Hopefully others who had trouble can try a similar approach. (Thinking about writing a book about this strategy!)

---
Nayan Hajratwala - 734.658.6032 - http://agileshrugged.com - @nhajratw

[Jeff Kelley]

Wouldn’t it be theoretically possible to permit torrent traffic that did not exit the local network—from the speaker’s machine to the precompiler attendees’ laptops, for instance?

Jeff Kelley

Slaun...@gmail.com | @SlaunchaMan | jeffkelley.org

[M. Knisely]

While torrent seems like it would be a good method for delivering, remember that wifi is a shared medium.  There would still be a saturation of the RF space because each of the clients on the AP would have its own data stream.

What would help this would be to have some sort of multicast distribution system.  That way, the AP would send one frame, and each of the clients would receive it.  I've not done any leg-work to see if such a system exists, but I can't imagine this is a unique problem.

The major issue I see with this solution would be that each user would need to have the client already, and each would need to be ready for the delivery all at once.  

Michael Knisely

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "CodeMash" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/codemash/ne-006pN6Mw/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to codemash+u...@googlegroups.com.

[Jay Wren]

IP Multicast over wifi should work.

Here is the details of broadcast packets over wifi: http://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/a/3787

--

Jay