Big Temporary Networks

Thu Sep 13 21:45:55 UTC 2012

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Måns Nilsson" <mansaxel at besserwisser.org>

> 04:05:41PM +0000 Quoting Dylan Bouterse (dylan at corp.power1.com):
> > I'm not sure if this is obvious for this list or not, but with your
> > WiFi nodes, a good practice for that kind of density is more nodes,
> > lower power. Keep the client connection load per AP as low as
> > possible to improve overall performance. Jacking up the power in a
> > small area like that will just step on the adjacent APs and cause
> > issues.

It was.  :-)  Of course, the propery may (read: probably does) have its 
own conference areas and residential floors wifi, and those may or may
not be V-WLAN capable.

> An enterprisey AP flock that perhaps even can talk to eachother about
> power levels is a must.
> 
> At all possible cost, avoid login or encryption for the wireless.

Yes, and no.

> Captive portals suck, especially if they try to be clever and keep an eye on
> the link-state to each client. Tablets and smartphones turn their radios
> off to conserve battery, and that means having to login all the time.

My plan is to have 3 VWLANs: 

worldcon-guests, which will have one-time captive portal; I want the 
controller to remember the MAC address everywhere, all week

worldcon-dealers, no captive portal (for credit card and other embedded
machines), and

worldcon-staff, which may have some relaxed outbound security compared to
the other networks.

(For example, I have no problems blocking outbound port 25 and redirecting
recursive DNS -- though I do want a system that permits me to whitelist 
MACs on request.  But I would do those on the guest and dealer nets, and
not on the staff one.)

> While things have become much better, doing 802.1x on conference
> wireless probably is a bit daring. OTOH eduroam does it all over Europe.

If I did try to do that, it would probably only be on the staff network; 
it's a much more contrained environment.

> Get lots of IP addresses. A /16 probably still can be borrowed for
> this kind of event. I know RIPE had rules and addresses for this kind of
> use a couple years ago, at least.

Indeed?  I did not see that coming.  Hell, perhaps Interop could be talked
into loaning me a /16.  :-)

> And get v6.

Yeah, I assumed that, though it will be interesting to see how much play 
it actually gets; these are SF geeks, not networking geeks.

> Do not NAT. When all those people want to do social networking to the
> same
> furry BBS while also frequenting three social app sites simultaneously
> you are going to get Issues if you NAT. So don't. (Keep in mind that
> the
> 5-tuple for each TCP connection more often will become a 3-tuple if
> the
> demographic of the user base is skewed towards a focus group and NAT
> is
> in use. )

This, right here, is the kind of gritty advice that brought me to ask
this question in the first place.  You're right; NAT is Right Out;
forget what I said earlier.  :-)

> Lots of IP adresses will also enable you to set sensible DHCP lease
> times on the failover-connected (because they are, right?) DHCP
> servers. Nothing is so detrimental to connectivity experience as lost
> leases from either crashed DHCP servers or short lease times.
> Be very thorough and careful in setting DHCP up. It'll pay off.

Oh yeah.  I'm fond of leases as short as 30 minutes, though if I have
a /16, I won't care as much.

> Have DNS resolvers locally. Unbound is good. As is BIND.

Yep, with lots of RAM on the boxes.

> It might be a good idea to have reverse DNS delegation set up,
> perhaps via the BIND $GENERATE directive; just something like
> wireless-node-47-11.world.con will do.

Hmmm. 

> Make sure that the whois contacts for the address block are proper.

Well, I do have 3 years to plan.  :-)

> Try setting some monitoring up; it is good to be able to keep an eye
> on client count per AP etc. This is also much easier if the wireless
> solution is enterprisey.

I was planning on having a NOC, yes, albeit small.

Very nice, Måns; thanks.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
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