Archive for September, 2009
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Backstage on ZDNet!
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]
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Press Record
[ 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 »
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Now for something completely different – safety and destruction
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.
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Where did all the netbook pallets go??
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.
![3884538854_6f6a8b2b2a[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3884538854_6f6a8b2b2a1_thumb.jpg "3884538854_6f6a8b2b2a[1]")
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
![clip_image001[7]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/clip_image0017_thumb.jpg "clip_image001[7]")
![clip_image001[9]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/clip_image0019_thumb.jpg "clip_image001[9]")
![clip_image001[11]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/clip_image00111_thumb.jpg "clip_image001[11]")
-jorke
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Connors to Blog. Copy?
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.
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Intel wifi driver issue resolution
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.
- I <3 Helpful People
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.
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Day 1
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Intel wifi driver issues
We’ve had a few reports today from people experiencing the following:
- Wifi becomes unresponsive including being stuck ‘on’ so that hardware switch does not turn off the interface.
- 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:
- There are a large number of access points.
- There are a large number of clients.
- 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.
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The most important job at the event
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SCOOP!! MOBY IS DOING THE KEYNOTE!!
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.
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Random Jorke Vids
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:
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Issues with LiveID…. SORTED
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..
![WLIDLogo[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/WLIDLogo1_thumb.png "WLIDLogo[1]")
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
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Don’t Forget The Human Factor
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 »
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The GCCEC Side….
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'
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End of a sort of day off
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.
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Closing out the week that was
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:
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Netbook Imaging is almost done…
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..
![3883750307_5beaf682a7[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3883750307_5beaf682a71_thumb.jpg "3883750307_5beaf682a7[1]")
![3883752665_53d22ff3ca[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3883752665_53d22ff3ca1_thumb.jpg "3883752665_53d22ff3ca[1]")
![3884543074_fbc13e85d6[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3884543074_fbc13e85d61_thumb.jpg "3884543074_fbc13e85d6[1]")
![3883744675_aeea28dc9f[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3883744675_aeea28dc9f1_thumb.jpg "3883744675_aeea28dc9f[1]")
![3884536256_6837a976b8[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3884536256_6837a976b81_thumb.jpg "3884536256_6837a976b8[1]")
![3883747825_2e5f85f72e[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3883747825_2e5f85f72e1_thumb.jpg "3883747825_2e5f85f72e[1]")
Moving on today we’re starting building the showcase with our great HP demo servers – more on that later
- jorke
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Hands on Labs – on site and almost ready to rock and roll
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.
More as we start our roll out.
Cheers
Kyle -
From Sydney to Reality
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.
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Diversity is good
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.
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Random wireless network commissioning bits
(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
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TechEd setup, 2009
Empty trestle tables, waiting for PCs in the Technical Learning Centre Read the rest of this entry »
![3884538854_6f6a8b2b2a[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3884538854_6f6a8b2b2a1.jpg "3884538854_6f6a8b2b2a[1]")
![clip_image001[7]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/clip_image0017.jpg "clip_image001[7]")
![clip_image001[9]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/clip_image0019.jpg "clip_image001[9]")
![clip_image001[11]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/clip_image00111.jpg "clip_image001[11]")
![WLIDLogo[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/WLIDLogo1.png "WLIDLogo[1]")
![3883750307_5beaf682a7[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3883750307_5beaf682a71.jpg "3883750307_5beaf682a7[1]")
![3883752665_53d22ff3ca[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3883752665_53d22ff3ca1.jpg "3883752665_53d22ff3ca[1]")
![3884543074_fbc13e85d6[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3884543074_fbc13e85d61.jpg "3884543074_fbc13e85d6[1]")
![3883744675_aeea28dc9f[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3883744675_aeea28dc9f1.jpg "3883744675_aeea28dc9f[1]")
![3884536256_6837a976b8[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3884536256_6837a976b81.jpg "3884536256_6837a976b8[1]")
![3883747825_2e5f85f72e[1]](http://www.techedbackstage.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3883747825_2e5f85f72e1.jpg "3883747825_2e5f85f72e[1]")
Australian Partner Conference 2009 auteched brain damage cabling CCX chrysophobia cisco codify gccec HP mini-note imaging internet internet connectivity ipv6 jomablue liveid microsoft nat netbooks networking odd issues planning power rras tech.ed teched Tech•Ed telstra wireless wlan
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