Quakecon: Network Operations Center tour

[nanog at ics-il.net (Mike Hammett)]

Venue Internet is the bane of events. Crazy expensive. Almost as expensive as a laborer in Chicago to move your box from the truck to your booth. ;-) 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 



Midwest Internet Exchange 
http://www.midwest-ix.com 


----- Original Message -----

From: "Ethan" <telmnstr at 757.org> 
To: nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Monday, August 3, 2015 9:58:35 AM 
Subject: Re: Quakecon: Network Operations Center tour 


I help with an event that has a pretty decent sized lan party as well. 
We're not just focused on the lan party, more of a rock concerts - huge 
arcade - panels - lan party type event. 

It was a few years ago that a mincraft "griefing" team came and attacked 
the network internally. At the time the BYOC LAN party I think was using 
3com switches on the edge. Griefers were doing MAC flooding or something 
that was causing the switches to fall over. And not just the switch they 
were connected to it was bringing down many of them. They were doing it in 
spurts and the people dealing with the network thought the issue was 
misbehaving equipment for a bit (it seemed foreign at that time that 
someone from the community would be doing it.) 

Mind you the people running things (volunteers) are running on little 
sleep, had no time to build out security appliances let alone watch a 
bunch of logs. They're pretty smart but you know - you get a bunch of 
smart people together they all bicker about how to do things their way. 

In the end, one of the griefers friends went and told on them, and that's 
how they were discovered. Badges yanked and banned for life. 

Most of these cons and events run on surplus hardware. Granted, these days 
there is more and more higher end stuff being cast away. More and more 10 
gig, Juniper, Force10 and other decent equipment coming into play. 

Getting bandwidth into the events is a pain. Huge venues are meant for 
large corporate events not lower budget cons and festivals. Venue pricing 
I believe is 750-1500$ per megabit. 100 megabit = $75,000 for the weekend. 
One year I rememeber there being a switch with 8 vlans on it sitting 
outside the back door with 8 clear modems spread out all blinking away. 
Geeks get creative. 

These days, a random family next door gets their business class FiOS paid 
for the entire year (with a good TV package) in return for a weekend or 
two a year of it being slammed. But that isn't keeping up with demand. 
I think sponsorship is in our future as far as bandwidth goes. 

Internally, the hotels charge for any ports. So if you need cross connects 
between rooms, it's pretty expensive. And it's managed by them so running 
tagged traffic is a no go an other things. So out comes miles of fiber and 
rolls of gaffers tape every year. And miles of cat5. The lan party is 
fairly concentrated, but other departments all have other network needs. 
HD video streams outbound, voip telephones, ARTNet, etc. 

It's crazy. But I guess it's a good way to keep skills sharp and learn new 
things. 

Also, Steam and others should make a caching server solution similar to 
what exists in Apple OSX server. 

- Ethan