Big Temporary Networks

Thu Sep 13 23:51:11 UTC 2012

Thanks for sharing that. I just got my CCNA and find this stuff interesting.

Derek

On Sep 13, 2012, at 7:18 PM, Nat Morris <nat at nuqe.net> wrote:

> On 13 September 2012 22:13, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Josh Baird" <joshbaird at gmail.com>
>>> Besides this, we have a fairly beefy box that handles DNS and DHCP and
>>> basic firewalling.
>>
>> Have you had to/been able to haul in your own bandwidth to feed it?  What
>> class?  (Real DS3/OC1/OC3, FiOS/HFC, something else?)
>
> Two weekends ago EMFCamp took place north of London in Milton Keynes,
> the UK’s first maker weekend long festival, ran along the same lines
> as CCC / HAR2009 etc.
>
> A small team of us designed the infrastructure for it, we started at
> the end of May, 3 months in advance. The CCC noc team in Germany were
> kind enough to lend us their event /19 + /48 + ASN, we built a
> temporary network spanning from Telehouse East in London Docklands up
> to a local data centre (Pulsant) in Milton Keynes.
>
> Pulsant sponsored us with a 1gb/s L2 circuit from Telehouse to Milton
> Keynes, we placed a router (c7202+npe-g2) in each decenter. We took on
> transit in both sites and had temporary membership to LONAP in
> Telehouse where we connected to their route server for v4,v6 peering
> and even multicast.
>
> Biggest cost was the 2 mile link from the dc back to the festival
> site, we rented 2 portable 30m trailer mounted masts. A microwave
> company loaned us some DragonWave kit which ran on 18ghz at 385mb full
> duplex, this was our primary link and they applied for a UK OFCOM temp
> telco license for this on our behalf. We also bought a pair of
> Ubiquiti Nanobridge M5’s for backup, running at about 100mb.
>
> We didn’t firewall anything, users were made aware what they were
> connecting to, there were no passwords on the SSID’s, we had no agenda
> to monitor traffic. We published abuse email addresses and a number
> that people could call if required and we would act on it (the RIR
> contacts for the address space were updated too)
>
> Our NOC:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929611918/
> https://dl.dropbox.com/u/74717/2012-08-30%2017.40.26.jpg
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/russss/7909193016/
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929909834/
>
> Onsite core and servers
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottinghack/7929611592/
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_d/7902260210/
>
> For wireless we deployed a pair of Cisco wireless controllers, all the
> APs were lightweight and RF allocation was easily managed centrally.
> https://twitter.com/emfnoc/status/241944863887749121/photo/1
>
> Just like CCC + HAR we deployed portaloo’s / datenklo around the
> campsite and campers connected up to them for power and Ethernet:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/ne0hack3r/7924490940/
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/je4d/7924689482/
>
> Sort out kit configuration out well in advance, really glad we did as
> we spent far longer getting the mast and microwave kit aligned that we
> thought. Switches, servers were all configured before arriving so we
> just unloaded and connected things up according to the plan. Avoid
> NAT’ing anything, speak to a friendly ISP and borrow some address
> space. We split DNS resolvers, DHCP, monitoring VMs across 3 separate
> VM hosts just in case one had a hardware failure, don't rely on a
> single server box.
>
> Do it properly and attendees will be happy:
> https://twitter.com/Ash_Force/status/242067006537474048
> https://twitter.com/markphelan/status/241896897290309633
> https://twitter.com/je4d/status/242386884276396032
>
> Our slides are here (warning 50mb)… http://www.natmorris.co.uk/camp_network.pdf
>
> Get a team on board to help out, ours rocked!
>
> --
> Nat
>
> http://natmorris.co.uk
> http://twitter.com/natmorris
>