Wifi in the keynote: This is how it is done

By: David Connors
Date: 30 August 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

This is how it is done.

We had just shy of 1000 concurrent users in the keynote. All the while everyone was tweeting, uploading photos and we were still getting 1-2ms pings to Charlotte Street exchange in Brisbane.

As Borat would say, “Niiiiicee.”

TechEd build – Day 2

By: David Connors
Date: 27 August 2011 | Category: setup, tech•ed 2011 | Response: 0

TechEd build – Day 1

By: David Connors
Date: 26 August 2011 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2011, tech•ed 2011 | Response: 2

auteched + apc 2011 Network Design

By: David Connors
Date: 20 August 2011 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2011, tech•ed 2011 | Response: 1

People often ask me for more information about the network design and implementation for tech•ed and APC.

I finished off the physical design for the MDF and IDFs a while ago and thought I would take the time to post these in case you wanted to build your own 3000 person corporate conference at home. I am only covering off the network side of things below – there is a massive HP + Microsoft private cloud solution going in at the event that will need post(s) in its own right.

In terms of fast Internets

• 1000 mbps of Internet connectivity provided by Telstra Internet Direct. This is a high performance e-line service back to Telstra Internet Direct in the Charlotte St exchange (i.e. it is a wholesale/service-provider quality service, uncontended back to their core).
• An additional 500 mbps of Internet connectivity from Over The Wire as a redundancy option.
• BGP routing under our own AS9984 to make the best use of the combined link.
• IPv4 and IPv6.

In terms of WiFi

• Cisco 5508 WLC
• 50 x Cisco Aironet 1252 access points
• Each AP has 2 x radio interfaces (2.4 and 5GHz) for a total of 100 radios supporting 802.11a, b, g, and n

In terms of physical infrastructure

• 2 x Brocade CER units for core routing
• 2 gbps LACP core trunking between the routers, core switches and wireless LAN controller
• 1 gbps distribution network
• 77 switches deploying 2000+ ports of connectivity

IDF Physical Design

MDF Physical Design

Also available as a PDF export of the original VSD:

Project 3031 – Tech·Ed 2011 Network Design and Implementation (Microsoft Pty Ltd) – Network Design

If you have any questions then post them below.

World IPv6 Day

By: Jorke Odolphi
Date: 08 June 2011 | Category: ipv6, networking, tech•ed 2010, tech•ed 2011 | Response: 0

And a site note – If you’ve enabled IPv6, make sure you allow ICMPv6 on your firewalls, assuming your firewall supports it

tech•ed and the IPocalypse: What you need to know.

By: Jorke Odolphi
Date: 01 April 2011 | Category: Uncategorized, ipv6, networking, planning, setup, tech•ed 2011, wireless | Response: 13

As planning for tech•ed 2011 in September this year has formally commenced I’m again in the role of being responsible for the technology across the whole event (including the Australian Partner Conference).

Each year I’ve challenged our technical team to try something risky to keep us honest about leading with first rate technology implementation and practice. You can see our success on this blog and numerous press articles.

The first challenge I’ve identified this year is to move the whole event from a NAT’d network to a full blown public routed network, similar to what you see with an ISP. We’ve based this looking at last years usage pattern on our networks , and after some research we’ve come to this conclusion due to the lack of sensibly priced devices that can support 8000+ clients with many port mappings.

To some extent we achieved part of this last year with giving everyone a public routable ipv6 address with all ipv4 still being NAT’d. Our key requirement to support approximately 2500 delegates a few hundred staff and many, many ip enabled devices it to acquire a large range of pubic ip’s in the order of a /19,  /18 or /17 giving us 8192 or 16384, 32768 respectively, possible clients to support (if you don’t understand see CIDR).

Now the impending exhaustion of ipv4 address space commonly referred to as the IPocalypse you can imagine this kind of addressable space is not easily obtainable  – and can sometimes even go for a high price .  Last year we requested a temporary allocation from APNIC out of their portable/temporary range, which we used for a couple of weeks and shortly after returned. As a side note that same temporary range was used by LinuxConf in Brisbane a few months later, however sites like speedtest.net still cached the Microsoft tech•ed entry at the event… 

In our manner of planning ahead, last week we initiated our request to APNIC for a /17 or /18 or /19, as well as a temporary ipv6 allocation.. This was the response from APNIC.(note that the names and contact details have been scrubbed to protect the not so innocent – of course read from the ) ;

From: xxxxx@xxxxx
Date: Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 11:47 AM
Subject: [APNIC #XXXXXX] Temporary IPv4 and IPv6 allocation for Microsoft TechEd
To: xxxxx@xxxx.xxx

Dear XXXXXXX,

Thank you for your email reply.

There is no IPv4 address space available for temporary allocation.

This reserved address space is no longer available as it has been placed
back in the APNIC free pool for distribution.

Please let us know if you wish to continue to obtain a temporary /48
IPv6 assignment from APNIC.

We look forward to hear back from you.
If you have and further questions, please let us know.

Kind Regards,
--
____________________________________________________________________
APNIC       sip:

http://www.apnic.net

_____________________________________________________________________

* Sent by email to save paper. Print only if necessary.
On Wed Mar 23 10:06:01 2011, xxxx@xxxx.xx wrote:
> Hi XXXX,
>
> What is the largest v4 block you can offer?
>
> I was under the understanding that APNIC had a block of space parked for
> temporary uses like this event (the netblock we used at TE last year was
> used at LinuxConf this year).
>
> XXXXXX.
>
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 10:01 AM, XXXX XX via RT  wrote:
>
> > Dear XXXXX,
> >
> > Thank you for your email.
> >
> > In regards to your request, due to the APNIC reaching Stage 2 of the
> > IPv4 Exhaustion plan, APNIC are unable to provide a temporary /17 IPv4
> > allocation.
> >
> > However, we are able to provide you a temporary /48 IPv6 assignment.
> >
> > Please let us know if you wish to continue to obtain a temporary /48
> > IPv6 assignment from APNIC.
> >
> > We look forward to hear back from you.
> >
> > If you have any questions, please let us know.
> >
> > Kind Regards,
> >
> > --
> > _____________________________________________________________________
> > APNIC       sip:
> > http://www.apnic.net                 phone:
> >                                       fax:
> > _____________________________________________________________________
> >
> > * Sent by email to save paper. Print only if necessary.
> > On Tue Mar 22 11:39:03 2011, xxxx@xxxx.xxx wrote:
> > > Hi there,
> > >
> > > We are in planning stages for Microsoft TechEd 2011 to be held in the
> > > Gold Coast Convention Centre this year. As per last year we would like
> > > to obtain a temporary allocation for use at the event.
> > >
> > > We are seeking the following:
> > >
> > > * IPv6 /48
> > > * IPv4 /17
> > >
> > > The earliest date we would be using these addresses is the 1st of July
> > > 2011.
> > >
> > > We would return the addresses on the 16th of September 2011.
> > >
> > > Could you please advise what you require for this allocation and when
> > > it might be approved so that we can do our physical network design.

So that’s it then – no more ipv4 space for us. We’ve committed to the path of deploying a fully routed network so it looks like it will be an:  IPv6 ONLY network!

We are working really hard to make sure that the key resources for the event (the schedule builder, for example) are available over IPv6.

As for other purposes not directly related to the event, we will not be offering IPv4 connectivity.

There will be an option to purchase time on Telstra NextG USB dongles at the event and we are working hard on coming up with a good sponsorship arrangement to help out with the cost of IPv4 network access during tech•ed.

- Jorke and the network team aka David Connors

Infrastructure Saturday 2010 Slide Deck

By: David Connors
Date: 08 November 2010 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2010, Uncategorized, ipv6, networking, tech•ed 2009, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 0

We had a great time at Infrastructure Saturday on the 6th of November. An epic amount of work was put in by one Mr Mark Rhodes to make the event the success that it was.

The slide deck from our presentation is available here:

Infrastructure Saturday tech•ed Backstage 2010

Ben Parker presented quite a few slides on the enterprise software stack on DemoNet – content that we really missed out on delivering at the event.

We hope you enjoyed the talk – No evals through yet but in the wrap up a guy said that he gave us all “1″s because he thought that was the top score (not 5!) Doh!

We are presenting at Infrastructure Saturday!

By: David Connors
Date: 25 October 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

Jorke, Ben, and I will be preseting a re-run of our popular session from TechEd 2010 at Infrastructure Saturday.

Where: Microsoft Brisbane Office (map)
When: November 6th, 2010
Register: http://infrasat.eventbrite.com
Cost: FREE!

There are a heap of other great sessions (see more here: http://infrastructuresaturday.org/sessions/) on at the event so be sure to mark the day in your calendar!

Behind the scenes of the Giant Twitter/Flickr Wall

By: David Connors
Date: 21 September 2010 | Category: Uncategorized, planning, tech•ed 2010 | Response: 0

TechEd 2010 Community Wall

In case you missed it, there was a giant 6 metre wide plasma wall at TechEd that streamed tweets (from Twitter obviously) and various images from Flickr. We took the following feeds:

1. Anything with the #auteched hashtag in it appeared on the tweet slide;
2. Anything with #news and #auteched hashtags in it from the user @auteched (the ‘official’ news feed for the event) was used for the blue news slide;
3. Anything from the TechEd Australia Flickr set was used for the photo sets.

The app itself was written using .NET 4 + WPF and Visual Studio 2010.

The PC that ran the display (“riceputer”, my blingy gaming rig, named after four-banger rice cars):

• Intel Core i7 920 @ 2.67GHz
• Radeon HD5850 (1GB RAM)
• 3GB of triple channel RAM

The display formed a centre-piece for the community in the expo hall. It was received really well by the delegates and hopefully this will become a permanent fixture at tech•eds of the future. The expo wall was used as backing on the main stage and there were a heap of beanbags and comfy couches around in front of it – the whole area had a really nice community feel. We saw heaps of people sitting around and tweeting to see if their tweets would pop up on the display (come on guys, as if we’d smoke-and-mirrors you – you’re all too smart for that )

Technical Direction Company (the audio visual supplier to the event) provided the display and the necessary matrix hardware. We provided a 1080p DVI feed (1920 x 1080) and they used a device called a Sypder (from Vista Systems) to split the top 729 pixels of that feed across all of the plasmas. You can see the initial calibration of the display in this video (sorry for the end bit, Patrick ).

In terms of application development (and it will be no surprise to any of the developers reading this): WPF is a thirsty beast. The application had to run 12 hours a day without a glitch or leak and this proved to be very difficult to achieve with WPF.

The individual character animations on the tweet screen were achieved by:

1. Downloading the tweets in a background thread and scrubbing that against a profanity filter;
2. Using GetGlyphTypeface() on the TextBlock object to read the metrics for the individual characters in the tweet (see this http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC26720.png).
3. Create a separate TextBlock control for each of the characters in the tweet. We did this while honouring all of the kerning etc in the original font glyphs;
4. Animate each of the characters individually to achieve arbitrary layout effects and animations.

In retrospect, this was a LOT of work that probably was lost on people watching the display. If we had our time over we might have just stuck with animating an individual TextBlock or Canvas and transitioning the tweets in in one hit (as was the case on the blue News @ TechEd slide).

We found that using storyboard based animations was very problematic. Each time the tweets appear we bring in four at a time, in four sets for a total of 16 tweets meaning a worst case scenario of ~2500 individual items in the storyboard. We tried a lot of different approaches to interacting with the WPF storyboards but in all cases we found that there were subtle leaks, even for items that were well out of scope. Over time (and remember we’re running this all day and night) memory usage would creep up.

In the end, we resolved to ditch storyboards altogether and manually created the WPF animations and queued them up ourselves. Once we did this, the memory leakage issues disappeared and the app would sit on a steady 111 meg of RAM usage indefinitely.

We found that the static storyboarding in WPF was excellent for prototyping (i.e. just writing up XAML by hand) but as soon as you start modifying those in code you’re in for a world of pain. That isn’t really an isolated experience as far as we can tell – check out the memory usage on Blu, MetroTwit, etc.

For next year, it would be great to do this again using the new Twitter streaming APIs and XNA.

Tech•Ed backstage 2010 – VOC208 – The Presentation

By: David Connors
Date: 11 September 2010 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, Australian Partner Conference 2010, Uncategorized, ipv6, netbooks, networking, planning, setup, tech•ed 2009, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 0

We did a talk on the infrastructure behind TechEd 2010 as one of the very last sessions of the event.

The video is available here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Australia/voc208

The whole talk was very much ‘by the seat of our pants’ as we were insanely busy. Ben Parker, unfortunately, could not make it on stage due to other work commitments at the event. This was a real shame as he is ‘the man’ when it comes to the IT Pro side of the MS Enterprise software stack.

Unbelievably (given the rushed presentation and that most of the slide deck was a re-heated user group presentation I delivered a few months ago because we ran out of time ), we managed to score the #2 spot out of 165 sessions at the event, with an “Overall Satisfaction” of 4.74 out of 5. This is a great result but I cannot help but think there was a lot of other more deserving content at the event that probably should have rated higher.

We had a lot of good laughs – half of them at my expense. The notorious review comment from ARC301 came back to haunt me (2m 20s in … Thanks Jorke )

Evaluation scores follow:

Overall Results

Rollup Results

Comments

Frankly Speaking Episode 42

By: David Connors
Date: 06 September 2010 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2010, ipv6, networking, planning, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 0

Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi interviewed Jorke and I for their Frankly Speaking podcast. Tune in and listen; hopefully I was making sense with the amount of sleep I did have at that point of the events.

• http://www.noisetosignal.com.au/franklyspeaking/?p=253

tech•ed 2010 / APC 2010 IT Press Round Up

By: David Connors
Date: 05 September 2010 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2010, ipv6, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 1

Here is a quick collection of the press articles specifically about the infrastructure. There are a lot of others about Windows Phone 7 etc but we didn’t list those here.

• Microsoft Tech.Ed 2010 network shouldered the load, IT Wire:
  http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/networking/41617-microsoft-teched-2010-network-shouldered-the-load
• Tech Ed tames torrent leechers, IT News:
  http://www.itnews.com.au/News/229928,tech-ed-tames-torrent-leechers.aspx
• Microsoft Tech.Ed 2010 goes IPv6, ZDNet:
  http://www.zdnet.com.au/microsoft-tech-ed-2010-goes-ipv6-339305258.htm
• How do they do IT: Microsoft’s Tech.Ed goes IPv6, Computer World:
  http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/357238/how_do_they_do_it_microsoft_tech_ed_goes_ipv6/

This is a pretty good summary of the event in general:

• http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/technology/41427-tripping-through-tasty-tech-at-microsoft-australias-teched-2010

More write-ups coming … no, really!

IPv6 – bringing a horse to water..

By: Jorke Odolphi
Date: 24 August 2010 | Category: Uncategorized, ipv6, networking, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 0

So you may have seen some press here , here and here around work that we’re doing at teched bringing brave new world of IPv6 to the delegate experience.

Why are we doing this?

It’s well know that ipv4 address space is running out, while this is problematic for service providers and telcos – in our opinion it also as just as big a problem for application developers.

So this is our challenge this year – giving every delegate the chance to experience this first hand. We’ll be giving full native IPv6 addresses for each and every device that can support it.

We’ve learnt a LOT about the ins and outs of IPv6, those learning will be transparently displayed on this blog as per our normal policy.

If you’re at Tech.Ed you can check this out by going to http://ip6.me or http://www.v6.facebook.com and see the IP address you get!

I also hope you’ll enjoy our planned IPv6 celebration hours we’ll have during the event, where only IPv6 will be available on the network!

- The Backstage team.

Day 2 Expo Hall Build

By: David Connors
Date: 19 August 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

I managed to snap this quick video while waiting for some servers to build.

We come in peace!

By: David Connors
Date: 16 August 2010 | Category: Uncategorized, planning, setup, tech•ed 2010 | Response: 4

Your friendly technology team

Thank you to everyone for the kind feedback on our recent BIGAU presentation both at and after the event. I couldn’t resist including this picture again as a) I love it, and b) it was the only politically correct on in the slide deck (sorry Princess Parker!).

We’re on site now and work has begun in earnest on provisioning the infrastructure for the event. Jorke and Ben are still in Brisbane busily setting up all of the HP blades for DemoNet and these will ship down to the venue on Wednesday.

Pile of work

We’re going to try and keep the blog up to date as we build out the network infrastructure – but as always, delivery of the event will take priority.

If you have any cool ideas for topics you would like to see covered on the blog, post a comment at the end of this article and we’ll see what we can whip up in response.

tech•ed backstage @ BigAU – Tues 13th July 2010!

By: David Connors
Date: 09 July 2010 | Category: Uncategorized, networking, planning, setup, tech•ed 2009, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 2

I will be presenting tech•ed backstage at the Brisbane Infrastructure Group. Guess appearances may include Nathan Wright from GCCEC and Ben Parker from Parker Tech Pty Ltd

Venue
Microsoft, Level 9, 1 Eagle Street, Waterfront Place, Brisbane City.
Time
1700 for Pizza.
Date
Tuesday, 13th of July 2010

Further details on #BigAU.

I’ll be covering off stuff that happened last year, stuff that’s happening this year + our wins and losses. Shock/Horror! I actually have some good news re Cisco WLCs this time around too!

See you there!

abducted. returned. changed.

By: David Connors
Date: 29 March 2010 | Category: networking, planning, tech•ed 2009, tech•ed 2010, wireless | Response: 1

Toothless slack-jawed yokels win again

Cisco 4404 Marketing Poster

Long time readers of this blog (and the tech•ed 2009 team who have to put up with my whinging) will know that we had a significant number of challenges getting the wifi at GCCEC up to a scratch. Today I am happy to announce, however, that we have had a win. The 5508 delivers in the areas the 4404 didn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Hitting Reset for 2009 -> 2010

By: Jorke Odolphi
Date: 29 March 2010 | Category: planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 1

Delegate Network 

• 99.998 uptime (was a 45 second outage from a GBIC flapping..)
• ~1300 wireless clients was the highest amount connected.
• ~2TB of data downloaded (in 4 days!)
• 300GB send out.

Demonstration Network (the glass box of doom with the servers inside) 

• 100% uptime on services with over 80 virtual machines hosted for speaker and other demos. This was highly under-utilized.

Major issues 

Oops

• Intel Wireless drivers – escalated to Intel who were sponsoring -
  they were kind enough to help us out
• Bit Torrent – Played network cop – Rickrolled access to key sites –  click here (I dare you)
• RRAS port exhaustion – escalated to our support team in India
• Live ID creation – another escalated to our support team…
• Netbook deployment – finished this with brute force
• Session Recording – Expression Encoder crashes
• Wrong URL on netbook images – network hack
• Well i think this is minor, but there was some slight damage of a netbook box…

As you can image there was so much more that went on, we’ve added a lot of these things to our planning process which has already started; 

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving” – Einstein 

So here go, we’re hitting the reset button – we’ll do our best to keep you update-to-date from our end – no promises of course as we’re all focused on delivering to a higher quality outcome than before. 

- jorke 

Never gonna give you up!

By: David Connors
Date: 18 February 2010 | Category: networking, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 44

We mentioned in a previous post (see BitTorrent, traffic shaping and trusting users) that we had a small number of users who were unfairly monopolising network resources in order to download files via BitTorrent. The whole thing was a bit sad for me personally as I took it as a bit of a depressing display of the bad parts of human nature taking advantage of our deliberately liberal and generous policies on network access. We’ve been running the network the same way since 2004 and this is the first time we’ve seen people take advantage of it this way. Read the rest of this entry »

BitTorrent, traffic shaping and trusting users

By: David Connors
Date: 17 February 2010 | Category: networking, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 1

It has been a while since we have posted. We had the best intentions of writing a series of wrap up posts (JO has some overdue videos I made for him!) but after living in the convention centre for three weeks we were all really exhausted. The fact that tech•ed 2010 planning is already well underway means we sort of need to wrap up the 2009 blog loose end (that and I recently posted to the ausdotnet mailing list that you have to be careful allocate enough time to a blog so it doesn’t become abandonware – only to have two people mail me and say “What? Like TechEd Backstage??” )

Anyway, I wanted to write a bit about a particular position I advocate each year and how disappointing to was to see that position abused by a very small number of network users to the detriment of other users at peak usage times. Read the rest of this entry »

Backstage on ZDNet!

By: David Connors
Date: 30 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

Jorke and I ended up in a ZDNet video for a quick tour of  back-of-house. Alas, my carefully laid plan to stay behind the lens for the duration of the event came unstuck!!!

Original article on ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/hardware/soa/Backstage-tour-at-Tech-Ed/0,139023759,339298840,00.htm

[ I knew we'd get him on camera at one point, btw the guy you whos head you don't see is Nathan from GCCEC - jorke]

Press Record

By: Brian Chapman
Date: 23 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 4

[ This post was written during tech•ed however its editing and publication was delayed. Blame me -- Jorke ]

Well we are now under way with the session recording and the pressure is starting to subside; especially now we have a stable platform to work with.

Let me take you through some of the issues we ran into during the setup of tech•ed. Read the rest of this entry »

Now for something completely different – safety and destruction

By: David Connors
Date: 21 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 1

I managed to grab Patrick Cronin (Jack Morton) on the floor for a few minutes during strike (“set” or “bump in” = building the event, “strike” or “bump out” = pulling everything apart). Patrick is responsible for lots of production management work that does NOT involve computers and networks! He is indefatigable and always smiling – quite a pleasure to walk past and nod at in mutual agreement that neither of us have the foggiest what the other actually does.

Where did all the netbook pallets go??

By: Jorke Odolphi
Date: 16 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 2

You would have noticed from all the pictures of our netbook imaging that there were all on non-returnable wooden pallets –  to add further to sustainability efforts for tech.ed – those pallets will have a second life.

They’ve been turned into public space for Brisbane Park(ing) Day initiative by the Architects of Brisbane office of BVN – Check out the concept pics below – This will be built on 133 Mary Street Brisbane 7-10pm – so swing by and check it out. Tell the guys that are there that your netbook used to sit on those

-jorke

Connors to Blog. Copy?

By: David Connors
Date: 14 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 2

We still have a bit of content to post before we wrap up this blog for 2009. Sorry we have been a bit quiet but a LOT went on in the last days of the event and almost everyone in technology has had some sort of challenge in their lives outside of the event.

We’ll wrap things up over the next couple of weeks. There is some pretty interesting content coming so please stay with us.

Intel wifi driver issue resolution

By: David Connors
Date: 09 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

We did some further investigation into the wireless issue and came up with a work around. We’ve found that if you set your radio to 802.11a only, the issue will disappear. After doing this, one of the tech team managed to keep a Skype video call back to NetOps going across the entire venue without a hitch, while this same machine BSOD’d yesterday before it even left our office.

The helpful chaps on the Intel stand managed to come up with signed drivers that correct the issue (significantly higher version number than the in-box ones with Win7 RTM) however they’re still trying to get us the okay to release these. Interestingly they suggested that the work around was to disable one of the radios and the escalation technician said to turn off 5GHz – but please don’t do that.

For now, if you have an Intel wifi NIC, I recommend turning off the 2.4GHz radio as there is far greater channel capacity and bandwidth on the 5GHz radios.

The Netbooks have a different chipset that are unaffected by this issue however you will likely experience better performance if you turn off 2.4GHz.

Day 1

By: David Connors
Date: 08 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

Intel wifi driver issues

By: David Connors
Date: 08 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

We’ve had a few reports today from people experiencing the following:

1. Wifi becomes unresponsive including being stuck ‘on’ so that hardware switch does not turn off the interface.
2. Blue-screen-of-death (only one person on the technology team experienced this).

We did a lot of investigative work and determined that the issue is related to the driver stack in the affected clients. The issue only affects uses who are using Intel wireless NICs. The issue does not affect Broadcom (in the netbooks), Atheros, etc.

We managed to latch on to a very helpful man on the Intel stand in the exhibition who confirmed that this is a known issue where:

1. There are a large number of access points.
2. There are a large number of clients.
3. There is roaming.

Sound familiar?

The underlying issue is a limitation in a table that manages the number of access points in range – when this is exceeded the driver stack will crash. This is exacerbated by roaming.

We turned off CCX4 extensions today and that seemed to helped the issue a small amount by being less agressive in how it manages client roaming.

We’ll turn CCX4 on tomorrow for the keynote and then turn it off for the rest of the event. Hopefully Intel can give us a beta driver that fixes the issue. If we get it, we’ll put it up on the blog.

The most important job at the event

By: David Connors
Date: 08 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

SCOOP!! MOBY IS DOING THE KEYNOTE!!

By: David Connors
Date: 08 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

The things you find when you take a wrong turn. I was walking to the MDF through back of house and actually stumbled into the keynote rehearsal to find that they’ve flown in MOBY for it.

AWESOME!

It is actually Gianpaolo Carraro, Microsoft’s DPE Director. We did a cook’s tour of the venue for him and his family during set and all enjoyed a nice BBQ that evening as a rare bit of downtime. He’s an extremely good sport for doing this and letting me post it.

Random Jorke Vids

By: David Connors
Date: 08 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 2

Wow. I had some time free this morning and finally got to empty my phone. He are a random Jorke videos from last week (or the week before … I don’t know what day it is any more).

The F12 madness:

Jorke taking some servers out for a spin:

Issues with LiveID…. SORTED

By: Jorke Odolphi
Date: 08 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

This year we’re using software for Tech.Ed CommNet where you can use a LiveID for the portal. Sounds pretty straightforward right? well.. it appears to prevent against false account creation there is an IP blacklisting feature that blocks more than a few requests from a single IP address, which is fine until you’re behind a NAT gateway..

If you were trying to create a LiveID from onsite at Tech.Ed yesterday would would have seen a message along the lines of “limit exceeded..” – all our Tech.Ed networks are behind NAT, and although we could have cycled the NAT gateway IP’s around, that would only get us a few hundred go’s.

We escalated to the Live product team, in particular our favourite aussie member of the live team, Angus Logan who helped us sort it.

if you do notice any funkiness like this happening, please don’t hesitate to escalate to the Ops team.

-jorke

Don’t Forget The Human Factor

By: Nick Hodge
Date: 07 September 2009 | Category: netbooks, setup, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 3

I woke up at 4:00am this morning in a cold sweat. And I haven’t slept since. In the wee hours of the morning my brain, as is its want, was mulling a worst-case scenario: “What if we got the image or imaging wrong. How are we ever going to re-image these 2575 machines?” Read the rest of this entry »

The GCCEC Side….

By: Nathan Wright
Date: 06 September 2009 | Category: setup, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

Hi all,

My name is Nathan, I’m the Technical Services Manager here at GCCEC.  A lot of people ask me what Microsoft need off the venue and assume it’s plugging some computers into the venue’s network and all is done however this isn’t as easy as it sounds.  As you can see from the other posts on backstage we have run into a few hiccups with Tech.Ed 09.

My office at the top of the arena.. 'the loft'

Read the rest of this entry »

End of a sort of day off

By: David Connors
Date: 05 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

We’re at the end of a day off mid way through the events. It was a sort of day off because most of us were working at least part of the day. On a totally non-technical note, I just snapped this pic from the rooftop of Wave Apartments where we are staying. It is kind of nice to stop and reflect on how far we’ve come and somehow posting this pic of GCCEC while having a frostie at a BBQ with some of the team seems appropriate.

Closing out the week that was

By: Nick Hodge
Date: 04 September 2009 | Category: setup, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 1

After a long week, Jorke Odolphi, Ben Parker, David Haysom, David Connors, Jackie, Adam and the night and day shifts have completed the Netbook imaging. We are leaving a skeleton setup for the MDT2010 team to have a look at the setup, and the custom scripts we created. As imaging this number of machines is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime event: real world data is gold.

There will be a time, after TechEd, where we triage our original planning: time, budget, hand-offs, tools and techniques. As a Quality Manager at one stage in my working life: project review, documenting them and absorbing learnings are critical.

On a lighter note this Friday: here are two youtubes for your viewing pleasure:

Netbook Imaging is almost done…

By: Jorke Odolphi
Date: 04 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 3

We’ve had our ups and downs over the past week with imaging the netbooks for all the tech.ed attendees, I’ve been on site since Saturday and personally – if I never see one again it won’t be too soon as i’ve had a few late nights, resulting in some.. <ahem> issues.. sorry guys..

So you can get a sense of scale of our operation our professional photographer came in and shot some great photos..

Moving on today we’re starting building the showcase with our great HP demo servers – more on that later

- jorke

Hands on Labs – on site and almost ready to rock and roll

By: kylerosenthal
Date: 04 September 2009 | Category: tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

Hi There

First day on site – and first post! My name is Kyle Rosenthal – and I am the content manager for HynesITe, the group that puts together the Hands on Labs(HOL) and Instructor led labs(ILL) for TechEd – here in AU, North America and now in Europe. This is our 5th TechEd Australia – starting all the way back at TechEd Canberra.

So – what goes into the deployment of the Hands-On area? A lot of time and effort! Basically we will be deploying to the HOL/ILL area on a total of 5Tb of data – to 180 machines – in 3 days.

This starts at my place generally for TechEd AU – Once a year my wife’s patience is tested as I take over the kitchen table and suck a year’s worth of power in one week.

This year is sort of different – we have moved to a new house and I have invested in a new table.

However – when Kim and Ted arrived – the kitchen table was back in use!

The setup this year for us is Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, and our custom support front end that will assist you the attendee in getting to your lab as quickly as possible. This does mean that in the process of getting ready  for the event we will start, save, snapshot and export about 300 virtual machines. In addition we then will touch all the lab manuals that help you to get through your lab.

To do this we have 8 machines in the back end that form our core infrastructure, with gigabit network everywhere.

So we loaded up the car and headed to the coast, the drive from Brisbane to the Gold Coast meant another hour’s worth of work time available for Kim and Corey – one in the front seat and one in the back seat – with laptops in use. This meant that in true geek style when a file needed to be transferred between their laptops – no usb device was needed. So – if you happened to be beside the Pacific Highway and saw an Ad-Hoc wireless network named “Driving” appear and then disappear – that was us.

Now we are complete and on site ready to start the next stage of the deployment.

Office in setup

Ted at work

More as we start our roll out.

Cheers
Kyle

From Sydney to Reality

By: Nick Hodge
Date: 03 September 2009 | Category: netbooks, setup, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 5

I’ve just landed on the Gold Coast, dumped by bags in the hotel room and walked to the Gold Coast Convention Centre.

After meeting Jack Morton’s Patrick, and donning a hi-vis vest – its into the Technical Learning Centre to witness the setup of the 2575 HP Mini-notes/netbooks.

There are about 13-14 long trestle tables, each with and average of 20 machines laid out. 8 staff are out and about unwrapping each box, putting it on the table, and initiating the Windows 7 TechEd image. This is a sight to behold. It feels somewhat like an Industrial Revolution-era factory. A study in time and motion.

Time is critical now. We cannot delay TechEd, nor stop the setup of the Technical Learning Centre – so its all hands to the wheel to complete the imaging tonight. Being a production process that is now in production, and costing per hour – it is way too late to change anything. Either the image, the process or technology involved in the imaging.

To give you a vision of what is going on – here is a quick youtube I created within 10 minutes of arrival.

Diversity is good

By: David Connors
Date: 03 September 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 3

Sometimes people think we’re over killing infrastructure asking for two or three more than we need of everything in network operations.

Telstra has a major ongoing outage this morning: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1274075

Early reports are that it has taken out Next G, BigPond & Telstra Internet Direct – and certainly the 100mbps fibre service at the venue is dead.

Luckily, we are running APC off our redundant link which is a private circuit back to Pipe DC2 we blogged about earlier. This service is using different intercapital backhaul to Telstra so fortunately APC is completely unaffected (funnily enough we might patch the venue’s network over to ours so that they have Internet access ).

Telstra will be in tomorrow to install the 500mbps link but it is good to know we have the diversity up our sleeve in case something goes catastrophically wrong like this. Everyone thought we were bananas for ordering two 7200VXR routers for APC at Port Douglas last year … only to find the first one blew up within an hour of being turned on.

Random wireless network commissioning bits

By: David Connors
Date: 01 September 2009 | Category: networking, tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 0

(This post has been in my drafts since last week … we’re post commissioning on wireless now)

One of these things is not like the other one…

We recently mentioned that we completed deleting the WLC from the wireless equation at the venue. In rolling our the custom configs to the 50 autonomous devices we found that one of them returned an error.

One of these things is not like the other ones

Read the rest of this entry »

TechEd setup, 2009

By: Nick Hodge
Date: 01 September 2009 | Category: setup, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 1

Empty trestle tables, waiting for PCs in the Technical Learning Centre Read the rest of this entry »

The imaging begins

By: David Connors
Date: 31 August 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 5

What’s in a colour?

By: Adam McDowell
Date: 26 August 2009 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, networking, planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

Have you been to tech•ed in years past? Have you seen the array of colours used for cables in CommNet areas, Recharge Bars, around the Exposition Halls and inside the Session Rooms? You’ve thought either the person laying all those cables is colour blind or needs some serious tips from House & Garden on matching seasonal hues? Not so. Read the rest of this entry »

When I said 16 percent I meant … 16 percent

By: David Connors
Date: 26 August 2009 | Category: networking, tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 3

You will recall our earlier posts regarding the performance problems with the Cisco WLC at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre. If you’ve not seen them catch up here:

• Making Wireless Work
• Diagnosing and resolving extremely high RF utilisation
• Resolving a Hunch– Wi-Fi Performance @ GCCEC

Insufficient Traction Error

We had been working extensively with a number of suppliers to get the WLC issues resolved. To be honest, I reached the end of my tether some time ago as every call seemed to revolve around either co-channel interference (so much so that is now the standard butt of jokes on the tech team … car won’t start? co-channel inteference :\), or some discussion of why there were methodological defects in the reports we’d written rather than just focusing on the obvious @#(*&@ issue. Read the rest of this entry »

Update on the Internets

By: David Connors
Date: 25 August 2009 | Category: funny, networking, planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 3

Tomorrow is my first day on site at the venue (I don’t get to leave again until the 11th of September). I was supposed to be down there today but some lingering issues with the 2140 imaging procedures and timings delayed my trip to the convention centre by a day. David Haysom sent me an empty e-mail today with the subject of “Techops no turning back” and this image attached:

TechOps (or will be) - This is the room from which we will run all technology related technical activities during APC and tech•ed 2009!

Read the rest of this entry »

Ensuring IP address allocation integrity with DHCP snooping

By: David Connors
Date: 19 August 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, networking, planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

Nearly every IP network you use allocates IP addresses to clients via DHCP. There is a lot you can do with DHCP and it is a fairly well thought out and extensible successor to BOOTP.

This post briefly explores the sorts of issues we have with DHCP on a large scale temporary network, and the sorts of things that go wrong.

Read the rest of this entry »

The final coundown….

By: David Haysom
Date: 18 August 2009 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 4

We hit some big milestone in planning land this last week.

The week started with an integration meeting. A group of us from across  the project (logistics, construction, technology, catering) lock ourselves away for half a day. We review each task from the moment the first person sets foot at the venue to the moment the last truck departs at the conclusion of the event. It’s a mind bending job, but on a project like this with literally hundreds of people making things happen, it’s an important milestone to have this integration meeting. You can imagine we always uncover a few issues where the schedules haven’t matched up entirely during the previous months of decisions. The document, with over 1,000 line items, then undergoes updates by everyone and then we come together to do it all again later this week.

Last week ended with another important milestone for the technology team. We locked down the technology requirements / change requests on Friday night. While the project owners signed off the statement of requirements months ago, we obviously have a period where we need to cater for changes to the needs of the various event owners and Exhibitors. This week it’s all about our documentation, training crew, preparing final briefs and this Thursday we send the first shipment of technology gear from Sydney to for the venue.

JeffA asks: What Do You Want on Your Netbook?

By: Nick Hodge
Date: 17 August 2009 | Category: netbooks, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 2

Over on the Linkedin TechEd group, Jeff Alexander asks “We are close to finishing the Netbook Image for TechEd Australia. Get you suggestions for inclusions this week. What would you like to see in the image?”

Pop over and have your say.

At this stage we should note we leaving the Netbooks open for you to install whatever you like; Microsoft or non-Microsoft. These are your machines – and we’d love you to give Windows 7 RTM a really good test.

Internet Connectivity… plan A to F, plus a few more

By: David Connors
Date: 17 August 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, networking, planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 4

I’ve not forgotten to post – I’ve just been busy undebacling a debacle.

Everyone loves fast Internets. Providing really fast Internets at tech•ed this year has provide to be a complete pain in the proverbial.

Read the rest of this entry »