Archive for the ‘tech•ed 2009’ Category

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

  Date: 2010.07.09 | 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.

  Date: 2010.03.29 | 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

  Date: 2010.03.29 | Category: planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 1

   
  So it’s well and truly time to wrap up this blog for 2009 and move to 2010, i’ve been holding off until everytime of work from last year was resolved – strangely enough that happened just last week as the last invoice was sorted… (and no I’m not kidding..)
   
  So here’s a fast and loose summary of what we achieved – mainly to help with our planning for teched 2010.

  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!

  Date: 2010.02.18 | 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

  Date: 2010.02.17 | 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!

  Date: 2009.09.30 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.23 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.21 | 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??

  Date: 2009.09.16 | 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?

  Date: 2009.09.14 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.09 | 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.

  

  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.

• Day 1

  Date: 2009.09.08 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

• Intel wifi driver issues

  Date: 2009.09.08 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.08 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

• SCOOP!! MOBY IS DOING THE KEYNOTE!!

  Date: 2009.09.08 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.08 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.08 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.07 | 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….

  Date: 2009.09.06 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.05 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.04 | 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…

  Date: 2009.09.04 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.04 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.03 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.03 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.01 | 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

  Date: 2009.09.01 | 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

  Date: 2009.08.31 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 5

  

• What’s in a colour?

  Date: 2009.08.26 | 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

  Date: 2009.08.26 | 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

  Date: 2009.08.25 | 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

  Date: 2009.08.19 | 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….

  Date: 2009.08.18 | 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?

  Date: 2009.08.17 | 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

  Date: 2009.08.17 | 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 »

• Connectivity is easy… right?

  Date: 2009.08.16 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, Uncategorized, networking, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

  “You just have to flick a switch and its on, right?”

  “It won’t cost that much…”

  i wish i had recorded some sound bites of these conversations over the past week, and no, I won’t name names… Over the past few weeks we’ve been a little quiet, but the guys have been working tirelessy on the relentless march to arriving onsite. A major piece of work i’ve had the Codify, Jomablue and GCCEC guys working on, is getting the venue wired for internet for the APC and tech•ed. So while i’ve been off on a quick week of leave, the world for these guys manage to turn upside down as you’ll see, almost to the point that I thought might come back to a bunch of frazzled network engineers splicing fibre late into the night…  and that might happen just yet.

  From Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesstewart/

  I have to say, i’m constantly impressed by the commitment these guys have to quality outcomes and the sheer amount of effort to every aspect of the delegate experience. There are quite a few unique challenges that mandate we need super speedy internets; such as the thought of 2500 HP Mini-notes turned on at once to Windows Update or Youtube.. and i’m sure over the next series of posts you’ll see the huge amount of effort the guys have put into giving you the fastest internet connection for tech•ed Australia ever.

  - jorke

• Friday Funniez

  Date: 2009.08.07 | Category: funny, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 1

  We are 22 working days out from TechEd Australia. We have a warehouse full of HP Mini-notebooks, a deployment plan, a committed team and a tank full of gas. Oh, and Windows 7 RTM is now available for MSDN/Technet subscribers.

  All of this said, the following LOLCAT appeared to me today. Don’t panic. There can be no delays.

  
  see more Lolcats and funny pictures

• Windows Server 2008 R2 NAT Performance – Guest post by the Windows Product Team!

  Date: 2009.08.05 | Category: networking, planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

  [ 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 using RRAS as a NAT solution for 3000 concurrent clients; here is their excellent and helpful response. They did all the hard work with a physical simulation too! -- David ]

  Read the rest of this entry »

• Resolving a hunch – wifi performance @ GCCEC

  Date: 2009.07.22 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 7

  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 network performance. Given that the wireless infrastructure is state of the art and was one of the first “enterprise” deployments of 802.11n in Australia 12 months ago – this was odd and definitely warranted further investigation before the event even if to find there wasn’t a problem at all.

  We left Brisbane bright and early on Thursday the 16th of July to spend a day with the guys from GCCEC to get to the bottom of this latest issue.

  Read the rest of this entry »

• Is it that time already…

  Date: 2009.07.20 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, planning, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

  I can’t believe we are just 4 weeks today from the first step we will take onsite at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre. I know this because its Friday night as I write this, my first backstage blog entry after some mind bending few day working on event technology runsheets.This is a great reason to stop runsheets.

  
  Maybe I should step back a bit, back to November last year. Or further back.

  So, this is my 10th Tech Ed as Technology Project Manager. Honestly I have the coolest job on the project (Kleefie always said he did). My role is to work across the business owners, sponsors, venue and technical guys where anything technology is involved. Pulling a truck load of bits together into some type of plan. That is under the watchful eye of Jorke as the technology lead for the project and David Connors as the Engineering lead.

  We have a structured 5 phases approach to the delivery of large scale event technology. Long before you get to know about the good stuff like mini notebooks (possibly the coolest take away ever. So much so it has other Tech Ed events around the world wishing they had the idea first), we conduct a feasibility phase. Various Microsofties, the event agency team and the Engineering team comes together to look at how the project could work be at the proposed venue. We don’t work with a load of detail at that stage, but we look for the obvious pitfalls around timing, location, connectivity etc. This phase brings with it long brainstorming sessions and usually lots of research tasks. That in turn means I and a swag of others spend ages writing reports on the if, but, and may etc. All necessary stages for the business guys to make the big decisions. Once the decision is done setting dates, locations etc in stone we start the longer road of understanding what the business folks need the technology to deliver.

  So, no Jorke I’m not going to be the International Man of Mystery and neither are the rest of the team. Stay tuned and over the next few weeks we will share more of what’s going on.

  - DavidH

• What is CCX and why should you care?

  Date: 2009.07.17 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 0

  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 …

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• Diagnosing and resolving extremely high RF utilisation

  Date: 2009.07.15 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 8

  What’s wrong with these pictures?

  

  Per AP TX/RX figures with channel utilisation across the ground floor of GCCEC

  

  Number of Client Associations across the ground floor of GCCEC

  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.

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• site visit for tech•ed AND APC

  Date: 2009.07.14 | Category: Australian Partner Conference 2009, food, tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 6

  This year we are lucky enough to be using the GCCEC for two large Microsoft events, that are a week apart; the Australian Partner Conference (APC) and tech•ed and as you can guess this gives us a huge amount of efficiency on how we run the event with benefits in shared infrastructure and environments. We’ll have a huge breakdown later in this blogs life talking about how we utilise this shared environment and assign the costs, but that’s not for this post. Read the rest of this entry »

• Making wireless work

  Date: 2009.07.13 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 4

  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 bringing their own laptops, plus wifi-enabled mobile phones, plus Microsoft staff, speakers, crew, and all of the leechers holiday-makers in Gold Coast apartments across the road to cater for as wireless users.
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• Tech•Ed09 Netbooks

  Date: 2009.07.13 | Category: tech•ed 2009, wireless | Response: 10

  So it is pretty well known that for this year Tech•Ed that paying delegates will receive a HP Mini-note 2140 for everyone to experience the Windows 7 Experience. Big shout out to Nick Hodge for his hard work in getting this over the line. But as we’re over the legal and compliance fun, its down to ensuring we give the best experience to every single person that receives a mini-note.

  

  As you can well imagine there are many factors we need to consider when we’re expecting ~2500 machines to be delivered to end users in 5 days… And this will be a main theme of quite a few posts on this blog as it presents quite a few unique challenges.

  • Wireless Network planning – a LOT of work is been done to mitigate risks around this
  • Help Desk – Providing support around these machines including DOA’s
  • Power and Charging – Ensuring these machines will be charged up enough at hand out and there are enough power points around the venue.
  • Handing Out to Delegates – People flow!
  • Imaging – how to get the image onto the machines, luckily we have Jeffa helping us here as the “Build Czar”

  This is a start to the planning we’ve made, let us know what you want to hear about. To start with, the question everyone wants to hear about.. WIRELESS!

  - jorke

• TECH•ED backstage

  Date: 2009.07.12 | Category: Uncategorized, tech•ed 2009 | Response: 5

  Welcome to the start of tech•ed Backstage. This blog is designed to give the world the view of what goes on in the background of running the tech•ed Australia 2009 conference from all the people the work in the Technology team and those that we interact with in developing the production.

  We’re going to give the warts and all view of what’s involved in doing this focusing around the pragmatic approach of logistic and planning for this event and those related such as:

  • Products and technology used for the event
  • How the logistical planning is done
  • How to you build a network for such and event and all the prep work.
  • Tons of other information in mind numbing detail!

  Plus of course lots of statistics and prediction that all go into delivering this kind of technology for the event.

  So first of all some introductions for the core delivery team;

  Jorke Odolphi – Microsoft – Infrastructure Architecture Evangelist /  tech•ed Technology Guy – responsible for the delivery of the infrastructure technology and ensuring and enabling that Microsoft has the best technology on show.

  Other duties include attending long meetings and staying awake, breaking down barriers in delivery, helping the business understand the logistics and food/wine tasting.

  (source: flickr.com/photos/heroeshappen)

   

  Codify – International Men of Mystery – These guys actually DO the delivery of all the core infrastructure to tech•ed such as network connectivity, Wireless Networks, building machines for speaker rooms and connecting everyone to the internet. Simply put if you’re going to be putting anything on the network at  tech•ed  these guys are involved in some form. As a result they’re slaves to the network for the event!

  To protect their identity (and they’re camera shy) the picture on the right is an artists rendition.. (source wikipedia.org)

  Jomablue – International Men of Mystery – again another group of camera shy individuals. These guys are the core of the logistics for the event. When any piece of technology is placed in a location in the event these are the guys bumping it in, plugging it in and making sure the the power is right and in fact everything is right.

  To protect their identity (and they’re camera shy) the picture on the left is an artists rendition.. (source wikipedia.org)

  Of course we’re only scraping the surface of what we all do, and we can’t forget all the other people we interact with such as the tech•ed core team, Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre staff and if course all the awesome staging staff. We’ll be hearing from all those people leading up to the event, so sit back take it in and tell us what you’d love to hear from the bluelit parts of teched.

  - jorke