tech•ed backstage

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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:

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 [...]

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, [...]

(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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

[ The following performance analysis was submitted to tech•ed backstage by Arpan Gupta and the RRAS team. They own the RRAS/ipnat.sys components of Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2. Given that we're using it for address translation at tech•ed 2009, it is rather handy having them on board. We challenged the RRAS team to validate [...]

Previously you will recall we talked about the methodology we used to diagnose why the RF utilisation at GCCEC was so stratospherically high in relation to the actual wifi network utilisation and number of associated clients. In the last moments of that day on site we did observe a few anomalies with regards to real-world [...]

Early on in the history of wifi Cisco created some proprietary extensions called CCX (Cisco Compatible Extensions). These are now an open standard that a lot of network card manufacturers implement. If you’re bringing your own laptop to the event you should make sure you have CCX-4 compliant drivers, here’s why …

What’s wrong with these pictures?
I was given logon access to the WCS console at GCCEC at the start of May this year. Shortly (10 minutes) later I started e-mailing “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!” messages to the venue and the tech•ed technology team.

If you’re interested in tech•ed and have been reading the blogosphere you’ll know that every paying delegate is scoring an awesome HP Mini 2140 as a freebie! This is fantastic news for delegates and a real headache for the propeller heads behind tech•ed. We now know that we’re going to have 2500 laptops, plus delegate’s [...]