Frontier goes to Diggers
This year I’ll be going to the Diggers ‘n’ Dealers Mining Forum. I went last year with Peter Christie (when I worked with PACC as a Field Agent) and we managed the IT needs of the conference.
The Forum runs from the 26th to the 28th of July (a Monday through to the Wednesday), which means I’ll leave on the Saturday morning at 6:00AM and get back on Thursday morning at about 7:30AM.
We’ll be setting up internet access (probably with ADSL and satellite backup), a LAN to the booths, the media room and the computer room/internet cafe and a wireless network to cover the whole campus. I’ll also setup monitoring of the managed switches and IP accounting, so we know just how popular the network is, who’s using it and what they’re doing. Cacti will be used to graph the SNMP data that I’ll extract from the switches, wireless access points and the servers.
I’ll also take a few USB webcams with me, and we can do some streaming to the website (last year I wrote a script that would securely copy (scp) an image file every twenty seconds or so up to the Diggers ‘n’ Dealers web site. Also this year I’d like to see a ‘portal’ secup and running for the duration of the conference. On here we could have up-to-the-minute network and conference information, a photo gallery and most importantly, the presentations for download. I’m thinking something like PHP-Nuke would be a good idea, as it has all these features and then some.
Last year was a blast, and it the kind of envorionment where I work really well: there’s pressure to perform, and when you do you’re appreciated.
If you were attending a conference, what kind of technical features and facilities would you like to see delivered?
Were I a regular Joe at a mining conference, I would like the option to use a local SMTP server, since it’s possible that my mail settings in the office in Perth wouldn’t allow me to send mail from another network. Not everyone uses auth’d SMTP. These people may not be able to send their email, and may not understand why it suddenly doesn’t work.
Westnet has a great way around this - when you check your email via POP3 on a particular mailserver, you are allowed to use SMTP via that mail server from your IP for 20 minutes. I can move to any network, and not have to change my mail settings. So, local SMTP wouldn’t do anything for me at all, and is probably more hassle than its worth, but I thought I’d throw the idea out there anyway.
Hale makes a good point.
Also make sure that your NAT’ing allows for VPN pass through. It always sucks at these things if you can’t VPN back to the office. At the Cisco Powered Network show at their campus in San Jose, you could not initially access VPN’s. After they fixed that, the wireless kept dropping out and you would lose you VPN session every 15 minutes. This was really disappointing after they managed to setup an MPLS POP connecting to a 10GB backbone in under 24hours.
Do you know if anyone looks at the Webcam stuff for anything other than novelty value? I think the priority is always for accessing presentations, timetables and amusing photos of drunken colleagues ;)
Both are valid points and both I am covering, but forgot to mention.
Basically, from experience, if I have GRE compiled into the kernel then everything works a treat for VPNs. I learnt this lesson last year, where connection were dying after a few minutes of inactivity. I’m not sure how they even got connected in the first place without GRE support, but ohh well.
As for SMTP, I’ll have a local Sendmail server acting as a smart host. A smart host basically accepts mail as usual (though I’ll configure it not to accept mail at all) but doesn’t attempt proper delivery of mail it’s sending. Instead, it uses another mail server as a relay. Here I’ll use Telstra’s mail servers as the relay, as we’re using them for ADSL.
Im interested in Marks point. We had one client last year that couldnt keep their VPN connection up for more than 30 minutes at a time. We never did fix it, they just learnt to rconnect all the time. Mark W, how do we fix it?
I’m not really a networking dude so I don’t know :( I have seen it happen heaps though.
At our office in the states we had the same recurring problem to an access point that had significantly more clients connected - it appeared to periodically randomly drop people for a fraction of a second. I guess the network stack in all the VPN clients is really sensitive and disconnects when the underlying network connection drops (even momentarily) - I guess this would be a “security feature”.