Big Temporary Networks

Fri Sep 14 16:08:30 UTC 2012

In a message written on Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:53:01AM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> Yes, and I'm told by my best friend who did attend (I didn't make it
> this year) that the hotel wired/wifi was essentially unusable, every
> time he tried.  Hence my interest in the issue.

I find more and more hotel networks are essentially unusable for
parts of the day, conference or no.  Of course, bring in any geek
contingent with multiple devices and heavy usage patterns and the
problems get worse.

What I find most interesting is more often than not the problem
appears to be an overloaded / undersized NAT/Captive portal/DNS
Resolver system.  Behaviors like existing connections working fine,
but no new ones can be created (out of ports on the NAT?).  While
bandwidth is occasionally an issue, I've found an ssh tunnel out
to some other end point solves the issues in 9 out of 10 cases.

I wonder how many hotels upgrade their bandwidth but not the gateway,
get a report that their DS-3/OC-3/Metro-E is only 25% used, and think
all is well.  Mean while half their clients can't connect to anything
due to the gateway device.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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