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.”

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

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!

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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]

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.

Over the last week we have had countless problems with Expression Encoder 3, this software was to be used in conjunction with the ADVC55 Canopus to capture session recording both audio & video.

The software proved to be unstable and difficult to use.

The encoding would start well, but around the 15-17, 32 minute mark of recording it would crash, freeze and lock up the PC.

At this stage the only we could overcome the problem was to reset the ADVC55 Canopus and reboot the PC; this went on for three days.

We changed and tested every possible video & audio setting available but problems persisted. Expression Encoder 3 would allow you to record past the previous crash times and on preview the quality was great. After pressing stop and reviewing the recorded footage it showed really poor quality images, the only thing working well was the audio. Unfortunately the session wasn’t usable with only audio.

The only thing we could do at this stage of the event was look to a solid program that had as many features as expression 3. The main features we were looking for was stability, video compression and compatibility with the ADVC55 Canopus.

We came up with Windows Media Encoder 9. This saved the day! Upon connecting the Canopus device, the software immediately launched. The software automatically detected the signal being supplied to the Canopus and set all the video compression settings automatically.

Press record and off we went. One hour later the software was still solid, the images were quality, the audio was in sync and the playback was DVD Quality.

We had found a winner. This software is highly recommended in all facets, easy to operate, great playback quality and stable.

- Brian “The Video Guy”

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The F12 madness:

Jorke taking some servers out for a spin:

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

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

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.

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.

Quick recap

DHCP is an application layer protocol that allows clients to negotiate for an IP address lease. The protocol also allows clients to obtain additional configuration parameters as a part of the lease process (e.g. an embedded device client might obtain the IP address of a server from which it can subsequently download firmware).

You might think that DHCP uses some sort of low-level trickery (hey, it must! You don’t even have an IP address yet!) but in fact it is a very simple UDP protocol that works via broadcasts. So, you are in fact using IP to obtain an address so that you can use IP.

The protocol works roughly as follows:

1. The client sends a DHCPDISCOVER broadcast in order to locate all DHCP servers on the local subnet. The client sends a list of options in this request for items it wants back from relevant DHCP servers.
2. Any and all servers respond to the client with a DHCPOFFER response. At the time of sending the offer, the server(s) will set aside an IP address for the client. The offer also includes additional dhcp options that have been requested by the client.
3. The client receives all of the responses and then chooses one to request as a lease (DHCPREQUEST). Once that is sent, any server that is NOT the server that offered the address that the client chose will return the offered address back to their pool for use by other clients.
4. The server that recognises the response (via a unique transaction ID used throughout the conversation) will respond with a DHCP acknowledgement and ‘lease’ the IP address to the client for the time specified in the policy on the server.

When DHCP Servers go bad

Every tech•ed there will be someone who brings:

1. A dinky little home router with a view to starting their own rogue wireless network
2. An entire enterprise infrastructure in VMs, including DHCP servers and so on, with their network adapter set to bridge the virtual switch with the local network

In our experience, we’ll get at least two to three rogue DHCP servers popping up at each tech•ed.

As you can see from the brief protocol overview above, there isn’t really any authentication or trust between the clients and the DHCP server. Therefore any rogue DHCP server will be treated with the same authority as our own and start handing out IP addresses for a different subnet and with a different router and so on. Once this happens, a large number of clients can aquire an incorrect IP address quite quickly and this creates a massive PITA for the helpdesk guys to tell everyone to do a release and renew to get an IP address that works.

Trusted and authorised servers

You might have noticed that when you use Windows DHCP server there are a few behaviours that might strike a networking traditionalist such as myself as odd:

1. If your DHCP server is a member of a domain, it will not start until someone with administrative credentials ‘authorises’ the server to serve addresses. You do that using the DHCP server MMC snap-in.
2. If your DHCP server is on a standalone server, and it is running, and it sees another DHCP server that is also running and that server is a member of a domain … then your standalone DHCP server will shut down.

I believe that both of these approaches are a little bit silly for a number of reasons, the primary of which being that rogue DHCP servers are rarely Windows Servers. A little busybox machine or home wifi router isn’t going to play in the above scheme and so you’re still exposed to IP addressing integrity issues.

We’re really dealing with a layer 3 network security/integrity issue here and the correct place to solve it is in the network itself, not in the operating system of some select servers that exist on that network.

DHCP Snooping

DHCP Snooping is a catch-all term that covers a number of techniques for ensuring the security and integrity of certain aspects of the edge of your network. You can think of DHCP Snooping as a type of light-weight firewall that sits in every switch on your network.

The main feature we’re interested from the various features in the DHCP Snooping arsenal is where by individual ports can be marked as trusted or untrusted for the purposes of DHCP traffic.

We are deploying a large number of Cisco Catalysts throughout the venue for the event. The standard units in the IDFs will have 24 x 10/100 copper ports, and 1 x fibre GBIC to connect the switch back to the core of the network. The standard configuration we will deploy to these switches will set all 24 10/100 copper ports as untrusted. We will nominate the fibre GBIC as trusted.

The result of this configuration is that packets such as a DHCPOFFER received on one of the untrusted ports are simply dropped. They never enter the network. It does not matter if the device on the edge port is a massive Windows Data Centre Edition server or a $89 home wifi unit … the treatment is at the packet level and the result is the same.

Problem solved!

Since we started insisting on Catalysts in all untrusted/edge scenarios, we’ve never had a repeat of the issues of the tech•eds of many years ago. The solution described above is implemented at the right place in the OSI networking model, and at the right place in terms of the overall topology of your network.

If you have rogue DHCP server problems then it is well worth looking into the benefits of DHCP Snooping. There are a lot of features under that name and I’ve only briefly touched on one that is relevant to the event here.

Further reading:

• http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst6500/ios/12.2SXF/native/configuration/guide/snoodhcp.html
• http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1531
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHCP_Snooping

I recommend the first link as a very comprehensive overview of all of the aspects of DHCP Snooping that you can add to your network security arsenal.

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.

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

Give, and ye shall receive (unfortunately)

The Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre has a permanent 100 meg service to Telstra Internet Direct. We know from last year that we were saturating the 100 meg service at the Sydney Convention Centre (we actually put on more bandwidth during the event) and so with that experience, and 2500 people wanting to download the lastest build of Chrome Vizact we know we’re in for a rough time if that is the only connectivity option available to us.

Our first port of call was obviously upgrading the service in the building. We learned however that that would require an infrastructure upgrade from Southport back to Brisbane. The original estimate for this was … lets just say well and truly out of our price range (we could have bought another 2500 netbooks, but we did manage to get it reduced significantly) however with the GFC and what not there is no way we could budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to ramp a 100 meg service up to a 500 meg service.

As luck would have it (or not as you will learn), On The Net has a dedicated DWDM fibre service in the City Pac building at 2 Miama Keys (next door, more or less). In the past few weeks we managed to do the following:

• Gain an agreement from On The Net that we could use the service in the City Pac building and that they would provide a fully managed layer 2 service from there back to Pipe Network’s DC3 or DC2 in Brisbekistan. Once you’re in a Pipe facility your connectivity options are opened up considerably as they’re telco neutral.
• Gain approval from Gold Coast City Council together with an affordable cabling estimate for us to run temporary fibre from the convention centre, across the bridge that connects T.E. Peter’s Drive to the little island to the left of the convention centre, and then hop off that onto a council light pole and into City Pac.
• Over The Wire then organised temporary upgrades with connectivity for the Australian Partner Conference and then a burst up to 300 mbps for the duration of tech•ed. Brent Paddon from Over The Wire had even orgnised some temporary upgrades on the Brisbane to Sydney intercapital link from one of their upstream providers for us.
• We received a verbal agreement from City Pac for access to their MDF and data centre.

“Sounds Great!” I hear you say … “What could possibly go wrong?”

City Pac went into receivership on the 31st of July.

I’ve spent the last week grovelling to the morticians at PPB Receivers who are doing the wind up (nice folk, Receivers … not). We’ve tried everything including offering to rent the space, providing an indemnification from Microsoft. David Haysom even tried to get a call set up between Gianpaolo Carraro (Microsoft’s DPE Director) and the CEO/MD of PPB – no dice. They just want to put the place on the market.

It is an understatement to say that I am annoyed that the team had the entire shooting match organised and we’ve come unstuck at the door to an MDF across the road from the convention centre.

Where to now?

I’ve spent pretty much the last ten days with a phone stuck to my head and talked with everyone with an Internet we can use. A number of options have surfaced, two of which are reasonably firm committments from a supplier that we can do 400mbps microwave from the comms deck at the convention centre to here:

Corporate Centre 1 as seen from the Gold Coast Convention Centre communications deck.

We’d jump onto the roof of that place, then do another microwave link across to Royal Pines. The other plan is we do more or less the same thing to get to Austar’s building. Both of those facilities can provide the fibre back to Brisbane.

There is a final terrestrial option that we are exploring in the next few days and I’d really like to see that come to fruition over using a radio solution. I’ll post an update if we manage to pull that off.

If we do end up with a radio solution to get the extra bandwidth, knowing our luck of late we’ll end up with a freak dust storm/storm/aliens attacking during the show.

The fallback scenario is of course the Telstra Internet Direct service that is already there – and that is not a bad outcome however it might mean congestion at peak break times.

Anyway, we have plans hatching and I’m sure we’ll be able to pull something off.

We’ve not been defeated at a tech•ed yet … though this one is trying my patience.

we shall fight on the comms deck, we shall fight in the IDFs and in the MDFs, we shall fight in the data centres; we shall never surrender.

“It won’t cost that much…”

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

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