While searching on flickr for pictures: http://flickr.com/photos/mhw/104962874/ "So roughly in the center is a Linksys wireless router or access point. The FOSDEM dudes were trying to provide the entire room wireless internet access with just that one little box. That's probably more than a hundred laptops, all with wifi. Way more than one puny linksys can handle. FOSDEM people: think about the wireless next time, we need it and it sucked. Supposedly the wired network was fine. You need more than one Access Point per room." -- Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org> FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403
Benjamin Henrion wrote:
While searching on flickr for pictures:
http://flickr.com/photos/mhw/104962874/
<pompompom>
Benjamin, Thanks for your suggestion. The picture (and the text you quoted) was from 2006, as you can derive from the posting date. The Linksys on the picture was placed there on Sunday, since the firmware on the Soekris boxes we had last year was unstable due to a lack of development time. Also, look closely. The network cable wasn't even plugged in. We used it to have a connection at some point for recordings or such, don't remember, really. This year I had almost no complaints from people, and 98% good reactions. If I may quote one of the *BSD guys: "The network works great. It is the best network we had at any conference so far". The only time when the network wasn't performing well, was when the Mikrotik AP in Janson got slaughtered by one or more kids sending deauth packets. For the rest of the time, that AP (which was the busiest one) was running at 50% CPU capacity, but hit it's shaping limits most of the time (5mbit/1mbit). The number of simultaneous clients was somewhere around 50 in Janson. Anyway, suggestions and comments on /this/ years setup are really appreciated, as there is always room for improvement. Kind regards, Gerry - FOSDEM 2007 Network dude, in co-operation with my entire team and Joe, Olly and Dan from Greenpeace.
Gerry Demaret a écrit :
Benjamin Henrion wrote:
Anyway, suggestions and comments on /this/ years setup are really appreciated, as there is always room for improvement.
Hi, I would like to thank you guys for the amazing organization! In the python devroom everything was fine at the technical level (network, video-projector, assistance and info to get things started, ...). The only problem we had was that for 90% of the presentations there were more than 50 attendees in a 30 seats room. Thus for next year that would be great if python could get a larger devroom :) Best, -- Olivier
On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 08:09:24PM +0100, Olivier Grisel wrote:
The only problem we had was that for 90% of the presentations there were more than 50 attendees in a 30 seats room. Thus for next year that would be great if python could get a larger devroom :)
I'm afraid that goes for almost every project. We've had only a few presentations where there were more seats than attendants in the Debian devroom ourselves. Guess this is a symptom of the "FOSDEM is becoming a victim of its own success' problem... -- <Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes. -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 08:09:24PM +0100, Olivier Grisel wrote:
The only problem we had was that for 90% of the presentations there were more than 50 attendees in a 30 seats room. Thus for next year that would be great if python could get a larger devroom :)
I'm afraid that goes for almost every project. We've had only a few presentations where there were more seats than attendants in the Debian devroom ourselves.
Guess this is a symptom of the "FOSDEM is becoming a victim of its own success' problem...
Indeed. It was the same for Embedded. During the OpenMoko session there were about 175 persons, of which ca. 100 didn't have a seat. More people were standing outside, but couldn't get in. Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Olivier Grisel wrote:
Gerry Demaret a écrit :
Benjamin Henrion wrote:
Anyway, suggestions and comments on /this/ years setup are really appreciated, as there is always room for improvement.
I would like to thank you guys for the amazing organization! In the python devroom everything was fine at the technical level (network, video-projector, assistance and info to get things started, ...).
There's not much I can add to this. I think *all* the volunteers did an excellent job and this FOSDEM was in many aspects the best ever ! There is always room for improvement and the size of the conference has been reaching the maximum capacity for this location. But given those limits I am confident the volunteers did the best they could. The beer-event really should be going to another location. I don't think there's any doubt in that. Thanks to all the network admin volunteers, the infodesk volunteers and all the participants. I can't wait for next year. -- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]
On 2007-02-27 13:01:04 (+0100), Dag Wieers <dag@wieers.com> wrote:
The beer-event really should be going to another location. I don't think there's any doubt in that.
I will be soliciting for ideas on my blog "real soon now"[tm]. As soon as I find the necessary brain-bandwidth to do the typing. :-) - Philip [live from Sofia] -- Philip Paeps Please don't Cc me, I am philip@fosdem.org subscribed to the list. BOFH Excuse #110: The rolling stones concert down the road caused a brown out
Philip Paeps a écrit :
On 2007-02-27 13:01:04 (+0100), Dag Wieers <dag@wieers.com> wrote:
The beer-event really should be going to another location. I don't think there's any doubt in that.
I will be soliciting for ideas on my blog "real soon now"[tm]. As soon as I find the necessary brain-bandwidth to do the typing. :-)
Might be interesting to organize some kind of cycling pub crawl around Grand Place and la bourse to spread the load on several bars. -- Olivier
On ma, 2007-02-26 at 19:46 +0100, Gerry Demaret wrote:
This year I had almost no complaints from people, and 98% good reactions. If I may quote one of the *BSD guys: "The network works great. It is the best network we had at any conference so far".
On behalf of the Ubuntu-be booth: I used the wireless network all weekend and often got download rates just below 600 KiB/s, which I consider pretty good for a place with thousands of geeks around. So, great work from the FOSDEM & Greenpeace people involved! Only one minor complaint: unfortunately the wired & wireless networks were in a different local network range, so I couldn't play a Frozen Bubble LAN game with "SWAT" from Ubuntu-nl... ;-) -- Jan Claeys
Jan Claeys wrote:
Only one minor complaint: unfortunately the wired & wireless networks were in a different local network range, so I couldn't play a Frozen Bubble LAN game with "SWAT" from Ubuntu-nl... ;-)
Indeed, they were. The Greenpeace AP's in the hall did their own NAT. All part of the KISS principle we had this year, just to make sure everything Just Worked (tm). However, if you connected to the wireless in the room the wired uplink came from, you could have played FB in LAN ;) I'll see what we can do about that next year. Kind regards, Gerry.
Benjamin Henrion wrote:
While searching on flickr for pictures:
http://flickr.com/photos/mhw/104962874/
"So roughly in the center is a Linksys wireless router or access point. The FOSDEM dudes were trying to provide the entire room wireless internet access with just that one little box. That's probably more than a hundred laptops, all with wifi. Way more than one puny linksys can handle.
FOSDEM people: think about the wireless next time, we need it and it sucked. Supposedly the wired network was fine. You need more than one Access Point per room."
Can be true, though we were very happy to have working wireless in the Developer's Rooms which was not true last year... Personally I didn't hear any complaint about the network till now, on the contrary. Just to put things in perspective... Cheers Luk -- Luk Claes - http://people.debian.org/~luk - GPG key 1024D/9B7C328D Fingerprint: D5AF 25FB 316B 53BB 08E7 F999 E544 DE07 9B7C 328D
I had mixed success with wifi, but quite OK. I could never send mail through SMTP (port 25) to my email provider (tinet.org) though. I doubte whether that was some bug or an administrative decision (or just some misconfiguration on my side, I didn't take much time to debug my firewall, etc., although it works elsewhere). But for both wifi and everything else, many thanks to all FOSDEM volunteers. A great team that made a great event.
Xavi Drudis Ferran wrote:
I had mixed success with wifi, but quite OK.
I could never send mail through SMTP (port 25) to my email provider (tinet.org) though. I doubte whether that was some bug or an administrative decision (or just some misconfiguration on my side, I didn't take much time to debug my firewall, etc., although it works elsewhere).
SMTP is blocked on the university's network. It's their policy, not ours. This is a common practice to avoid people sending spam from the university's internet connection. One way to bypass it is to tunnel your SMTP connection through an SSH connection... Kind regards, Gerry.
Gerry Demaret wrote:
Xavi Drudis Ferran wrote:
I had mixed success with wifi, but quite OK. I could never send mail through SMTP (port 25) to my email provider (tinet.org) though. I doubte whether that was some bug or an administrative decision (or just some misconfiguration on my side, I didn't take much time to debug my firewall, etc., although it works elsewhere).
SMTP is blocked on the university's network. It's their policy, not ours. This is a common practice to avoid people sending spam from the university's internet connection.
One way to bypass it is to tunnel your SMTP connection through an SSH connection...
Or be a nice Netizen and use SMTPS and SASL authentication with your mail provider ;) It worked all weekend for me without reconfiguration. Edwin
On wo, 2007-02-28 at 11:57 +0100, Edwin Mons wrote:
Or be a nice Netizen and use SMTPS and SASL authentication with your mail provider ;) It worked all weekend for me without reconfiguration.
What Edwin means is described in RFC-2476 "Message Submission", which uses port 587. Unfortunately most internet providers don't support this... :-( -- Jan Claeys
Jan Claeys wrote:
On wo, 2007-02-28 at 11:57 +0100, Edwin Mons wrote:
Or be a nice Netizen and use SMTPS and SASL authentication with your mail provider ;) It worked all weekend for me without reconfiguration. What Edwin means is described in RFC-2476 "Message Submission", which uses port 587. Unfortunately most internet providers don't support this... :-(
No, what Edwin refers to is described in RFC-4422, "Simple Authentication and Security Layer" and uses the standard smtp (25) or secure smtp (465) port and is supported by serveral ISPs I know of. Ciao, Johan
Johan van Selst wrote:
Jan Claeys wrote:
On wo, 2007-02-28 at 11:57 +0100, Edwin Mons wrote:
Or be a nice Netizen and use SMTPS and SASL authentication with your mail provider ;) It worked all weekend for me without reconfiguration.
What Edwin means is described in RFC-2476 "Message Submission", which uses port 587. Unfortunately most internet providers don't support this... :-(
No, what Edwin refers to is described in RFC-4422, "Simple Authentication and Security Layer" and uses the standard smtp (25) or secure smtp (465) port and is supported by serveral ISPs I know of.
Thanks, Johan. This is indeed what I referred to. A lot of providers have this mechanism open nowadays to facilitate for laptop-users who cannot be expected to be on their home-network all the time. Edwin
On wo, 2007-02-28 at 12:39 +0100, Edwin Mons wrote:
Johan van Selst wrote:
Jan Claeys wrote:
On wo, 2007-02-28 at 11:57 +0100, Edwin Mons wrote:
Or be a nice Netizen and use SMTPS and SASL authentication with your mail provider ;) It worked all weekend for me without reconfiguration.
What Edwin means is described in RFC-2476 "Message Submission", which uses port 587. Unfortunately most internet providers don't support this... :-(
No, what Edwin refers to is described in RFC-4422, "Simple Authentication and Security Layer" and uses the standard smtp (25) or secure smtp (465) port and is supported by serveral ISPs I know of.
Thanks, Johan. This is indeed what I referred to. A lot of providers have this mechanism open nowadays to facilitate for laptop-users who cannot be expected to be on their home-network all the time.
That's exactly the purpose of the RFC-2476 message submission service at port 587 (which may have RFC-4422 style SASL-support), while port 25 & 465 are intended for connections between "real" mailservers...
From "1. Abstract" in RFC-2476:
[...] Separating messages into submissions and transfers allows developers and network administrators to more easily: [...] * Implement authenticated submission, including off-site submission by authorized users such as travelers [...] -- Jan Claeys
SMTP is blocked on the university's network. It's their policy, not
Also port 3000 was blocked. This was quite unhandy for us as we had the pre-alpha of our software running on that port (as is standard with Rails applications). In the end we decided to take down the stable version and run the pre-alpha on port 80 for the weekend. But on overall I am very happy with how the network performed. Wybo -- ::Student: - History, Informatiekunde (computer linguistics, IR, webtech) and Philosophy - Member of the Center for Metahistory Groningen (http://www.rug.nl/let/cmg) ::Free Software and Open Source Developer: - http://www.LogiLogi.org, Cumulative, shared commenting, publication and idea sharing: Where insight comes together... - ComLinToo, a computational linguistics toolset written in Perl - Lake (LogiLogi.org Make), a make-replacement using makefiles in pure C++ ::Being: - In the world, wavy hair, go figure (http://nl.logilogi.org/HomE/WyboWiersma)
Hi, On Feb/28/2007, Wybo Wiersma wrote:
SMTP is blocked on the university's network. It's their policy, not
Also port 3000 was blocked. This was quite unhandy for us as we had
I used port 2525 (usually I do it by default since some bad experiences) so I didn't notice any problem until Xavi Drudis asked me :-) -- Carles Pina i Estany GPG id: 0x8CBDAE64 http://pinux.info Manresa - Barcelona
Gerry Demaret dixit:
SMTP is blocked on the university's network.
Among other things, yes. But as long as udp/1194 (openvpn) and maybe tcp/22 (ssh) aren't blocked, I'm happy... bye, //mirabile -- "Using Lynx is like wearing a really good pair of shades: cuts out the glare and harmful UV (ultra-vanity), and you feel so-o-o COOL." -- Henry Nelson, March 1999
On Wed, February 28, 2007 4:21 pm, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
Gerry Demaret dixit:
SMTP is blocked on the university's network.
Among other things, yes. But as long as udp/1194 (openvpn) and maybe tcp/22 (ssh) aren't blocked, I'm happy...
bye, //mirabile
Happy to have squirrelmail on my mailserver ^^ Bye, Jordi.
Thorsten Glaser wrote:
Gerry Demaret dixit: SMTP is blocked on the university's network.
Among other things, yes. But as long as udp/1194 (openvpn) and maybe tcp/22 (ssh) aren't blocked, I'm happy...
Yes if port 22 was blocked it would be a catastrophe, the thing is people should realise that at the conference people were sniffing traffic and setting their machines to as access points. As one person said to me "Theres nothing you can do about that apart from finding them and [doing unmentionable things to] them". You really should tunnel all of your traffic when you're at a conference full of highly technical people as we're not all good people. Just be thankful that this years networking has been much better than most where we've had to do silly things like installing strange drivers etc to get wireless working. Phil.
Hi, On Feb/28/2007, Gerry Demaret wrote:
Xavi Drudis Ferran wrote:
I had mixed success with wifi, but quite OK.
I could never send mail through SMTP (port 25) to my email provider (tinet.org) though. I doubte whether that was some bug or an administrative decision (or just some misconfiguration on my side, I didn't take much time to debug my firewall, etc., although it works elsewhere).
SMTP is blocked on the university's network. It's their policy, not ours. This is a common practice to avoid people sending spam from the university's internet connection.
One way to bypass it is to tunnel your SMTP connection through an SSH connection...
I have my SMTP on port 2525, it worked without problems :-) -- Carles Pina i Estany GPG id: 0x8CBDAE64 http://pinux.info Manresa - Barcelona
participants (18)
-
Benjamin Henrion -
Carles Pina i Estany -
Carles Pina i Estany -
Dag Wieers -
Edwin Mons -
Geert Uytterhoeven -
Gerry Demaret -
Jan Claeys -
Johan van Selst -
Jordi Valverde -
Luk Claes -
Olivier Grisel -
phil -
Philip Paeps -
Thorsten Glaser -
Wouter Verhelst -
Wybo Wiersma -
Xavi Drudis Ferran