Barcamp San Diego

BarCamp wireless network review and post-mortem

Dan — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:33:02 +0000

It’s been almost 2 weeks since BarCamp and the final figures and bits and bobs of data are finally trickling in.

There were roughly 170 BarCamp attendees.
There were over 275 unique mac addresses at the event.

That means each person on average had approximately 1.6 devices on the wireless network. The busiest time was between lunch and dinner on Saturday.

Heres the bandwidth chart for the weekend:

It’s interesting to note that you can directly correlate the peaks and valleys in the bandwidth chart with the happenings at barcamp.

A little background: I’ve been doing networking since roughly 1993 – where my first network was two 14.4k modems hooked directly together, and ‘ata’ was run on both at the same time creating a 14.4k baud serial connection. We played descent that way! (it was awesome). Next was coaxial networking cards (token ring!) to play doom 1. Then shortly after that cablemodems came around and people were using ethernet. I’ve spent a long time troubleshooting networks and doing so has taught me well. A quote from the matrix comes to mind:

I don’t even see the code anymore.. I just see … blonde… burnette… redhead..

Except for me replace ‘blonde, burnette, redhead’ with ‘Streaming the game, uploading video, opening a torrent application’ or ‘people go to sleep, people wake up, people have lunch’ etc.

This time at barcamp we used two different wireless hardware vendors. Aruba and Xirrus. The hardware aruba gave us had multiple access points, and the hardware xirrus gave us had one huge one. We used the aruba hardware on saturday and the xirrus hardware on sunday.

Saturday we had the majority of everyone who came to barcamp in attendance, as is the norm. Because of udp/gaming/filtering issues last season I completely opened up the firewall, disabling all protocol filtering and traffic shaping. This was good for performance, but ended up hurting performance as the teensy pentium 3 firewall we currently have herding all the traffic started to strain under the load.

Add to that the dilapidated hardware which would often reboot if you touched it wrong, and you end up with a mostly-stable network “so long as you don’t breathe on it”. The firewall being the most fragile.

Here are some interesting things I was able to point out:

I could tell when people started streaming the football game:

It was clear EVERYONE was online:

I quickly found out when my packet filtering rules began working:

I could tell who was in what talk! :D

As for the wireless performance results that everyone was looking for, I can’t in good conscience say that the test was fair at all. Aruba gave us 3 ap125’s, which we used two of (each ap125 has 3 radios in it: A, B/G and N), and Xirrus gave us one giant radio(which contains I think 12 radios, 4 A, 4 b/g and 4 N).

Here’s the short and skinny:

The aruba radios were able to successfully cover all of the grounds with no trouble, just like last season. The Xirrus array had some trouble penetrating the multiple rooms and walls. Every ’sharp corner’ in that venue is made with a thin bit of metal. That being the case, if one were to take an xray of the venue, one would see lots of little lines floating around in the air – interfering with radio transmissions. So for this venue more radios would do better than less radios, simply because of the width of the place and the saturation required.

The Xirrus array though, was quite cool and people gathered around it to take pictures. I got reports that “the internet is faster” on Sunday, but that was easily because only 1/3rd of the people were there on Sunday compared to the day before – the bottleneck this time was the firewall being overwhelmed. Next season we’ll have a shiny new netbook as our firewall and we’ll be able to greatly increase our capacity (and likely not have to deal with scaling for quite some time).

As far as a ‘comparison’, it was unfair in Arubas favor because we had more radios from them than we did for Xirrus, but looking at the map after the fact, its quite clear that one Xirrus array should be able to out perform two Aruba ap125’s without breaking a sweat.

Overall:

Aruba: The hardware is great, provides awesome coverage. Each ap125 has 3 omni antennas in it, each attached to a radio – A, B/G and N. They’re quite buff! The software, I’m afraid to say, sucks. A lot. The web gui used to admin the mc200 we have has code problems and doesn’t work in Chrome or Firefox – I have to use safari or (god forbid) Internet Explorer to even be able to navigate its UI. There is no way to change the IP address of the thing without ssh’ing into it, and changing the SSID, encryption type, captive portal or anything like that is abysmal – page elements do not load, or do not refresh properly, or contain the wrong data. The hardware I have is in my opinion “Set it up once and NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN – for risk of having to scrap the entire config and start over”. Also, there is limited functionality as the ‘good stuff’, as it were falls underneath a more expensive license than we were not given with the hardware.
Xirrus: The hardware contains four quadrants – each with a certain number of radios – I’m still not quite sure how many, or if Xirrus counts an ‘A’, ‘B/G’ or ‘N’ as separate radios. If they do, the total is something like 12 – each of the four quadrants supports A, B/G and N, and there’s an omni in there as well for monitoring. These are all directional antennas as opposed to the omnis that are in the Aruba gear.The xirrus array right out of the box provides everything – all the potential functionality that the hardware and software are capable of. The web UI works in every browser, and one of the cooler perks is that the 802.11 triangulation works with zero config – you naviage in the UI to the right page, and you can see a 2d map of where clients are in relation to the array. Aruba won’t let you do this unless you have a floorplan – which I DO have (see above), however I didn’t want to risk bringing down the wlan for the sake of a pretty screenshot. Another thing that is clearly evident is that the xirrus directional antennas penetrate farther than the aruba omnis in any given direction – nearly 2x as far.

Conclusion: Despite the frustration in dealing with arubas UI, the multiple-radio solution works better for BarCamp since the venue is essentially a long rectangle. However – if I were to get my hands on another identical Xirrus array and lay them out the same way I laid out the Aruba gear – I have a very good feeling that the xirrus gear would outright spank the Aruba gear in performance.

As far as the rest of the event went – I heard nothing but good things! During the opening ceremonies that DivX was happy to record I’d say easily 1/3 or half of the room said that this was their first barcamp! Our community is growing A LOT. I heard nothing but good reviews about the food and the event – Intuit gave us the thumbs up that from their perspective everything went well. Stay tuned for an announcement for when we’ll be doing it again!

There a TON of pics on flickr of the event as well. Consider signing up for the mailing list to stay on top of all the future announcements and chatter during the off seasons!

Barcamp Saturday Schedule

Phelan — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:17:09 +0000

Here’s the calendar for Saturday.

Barcamp is THIS SATURDAY!

Dan — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:48:17 +0000

Aaaaah! Its in 5 days! What to do?!

First, remember the basics:

January 16th and 17th
Intuit, Santa Fe Campus in Carmel Valley

If you need more data, hit the wiki

Want to help the organizers? Get there at 8:30am and help us unload and setup!

See you there!

How to sponsor BarCamp – a budget breakdown

Dan — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:43:20 +0000

Barcamp has grown – again. This coming barcamp will be SD 6, which means we’re on our THIRD year of barcamp. Technically, since we had to push BCSD6 to January, we’ll be beginning our FOURTH year.

In the beginning we had to ask for wireless hardware, chairs, extention cords, you name it. As time went on the planning crew better understood what it took to satisfy the barcampers and adapted. I know I’ve personally paid out of pocket more than 3 times to get things covered – and I’m not the only one. This far along though we have a tightly regimented process, and we’ve been using it for nearly 2 years now – it works perfectly.

We ask for visa gift cards and checks. It gives us as planners the flexibility to go to any store, shop or vendor and buy what we need for BarCamp. Our budget grows every season. This last BarCamp we had more than 300 people attend.

Comparing the rough budgets from BCSD1 and this upcoming BCSD6 we can extrapolate the rate of growth, and what to expect for next time, assuming the community grows congruent to the trend.

BCSD1 had a budget of around 3 grand.
BCSD6 has a budget of 6 grand.
That means a couple things:

We’ve doubled our budget in 3 years
We grow our budget by 500 dollars every barcamp.

How did we come up with these figures?

Well, at first we had to literally throw darts. We had to assume, hope we got it right, then employ rapid course correction in the event we were off enough to cause problems. The second BCSD was a lot easier than the first.

The answer is that we grow these figures using the same algorithm as the budget figures. There were some troublesome developments though – many companies including some of our sponsors had to do layoffs due to financial hardships – so we had to lop off a chunk of our budget (didn’t get a shirt last season? This is the reason why. We can only print so many.)

Here’s what our budget looked like last year:

Shirts: ~$1200
Dinner Saturday: ~$1000
Snacks: ~$1000
Lunch Saturday: ~$1000
Lunch Sunday: ~$1000

That totals ~$5200. This season, we’re aiming for $6000 or more – we’ll take as much as we can get. We’re expecting some numbers from the LA crowd to come to San Diego this time around – more than before, so we’re planning on seeing numbers in the ~350 range. Thats food, snacks, shirts and equipment for 350 people for 2 days.

Here’s how the sponsor contributions are laid out:

Sponsorships can be obtained in one of three levels:
1) Primary – $750+
2) Secondary – $750
3) Tertiary – $300-$500

Visa Gift Cards or Checks made out to Dan Tentler (the sponsor/budget guy/) are the preferred methods of payment.

Alternatively you can elect to sponsor one of our ‘direct vendor’ costs:

1) T-Shirts – $1500
2) Lunch sunday afternoon – $1000
3) Lunch Saturday afternoon – $1000
4) Dinner Saturday Night – $1500
5) Snacks – $1100
6) Beer – $250

Simply email sponsors@barcampsd.org!

We’re very flexible – our goal is simply to have the event happen. If a vendor is not comfortable with handing over cash, they are usually okay with directly paying the vendor (for example, for dinner, or lunch).

Now that you know, please – go spread the word! We want BCSD6 to surpass the awesomeness expectations of the previous five – its our 3 year birthday! Help us celebrate it by having an epic BarCamp!

BarCamp SD 6

Dan — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:55:11 +0000

So you may be asking yourself – I think I remember hearing something about BarCamp in November….

You’d be right – except when we dusted off our hardhats we found out that year end budgets were tighter than ever, and many companies in town were doing layoffs. It’s remarkably hard to get companies to pay for a BarCamp when they can’t pay their own employees – so we did the sensible thing and scootched BarCamp out to January.

here’s the current lowdown:

January 16th and 17th
Intuit, Santa Fe Campus in Carmel Valley

We’ve updated the wiki and created a new Eventbrite Registration Page for BarCamp San Diego 6.

We’re starting collection for sponsorships as well, so if your organization would like to sponsor BarCamp San Diego 6, drop a line to sponsors@barcampsd.org.

That’s it for now! Feel free to log into the wiki and add a proposed talk or host a contest for Saturday Night!

BarcampSD5 Last-Minute Updates

Dan — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:39:38 +0000

There are some last minute provisions that came up we need to get the word out for:

We’ve manually backed out every order on eventbrite that contained more than 1 ticket. For Intuits security policies we need every attendees name, so people who got tickets like “Joe smith – 5 tickets” will need to have those extra four people go sign up themselves. This has also opened up a significant amount of spaces too – so more people can come! :)
Intuit has some policies that they’d like to iterate to all the attendees:

Attendees must stay within a 20 foot perimeter of the building. Going back to cars in the parking lot is okay, but the rest of the campus is off limits to us (that means the hiking trails, basket ball courts etc)
Fire codes must be observed: no smoking in the building, and nothing that generates smoke inside the buildings
Be responsible with alcohol consumption
Do not attempt to enumerate the network. Be nice. This isnt a hacker con (viss is watching. he controls your packets)

Thats it! Short n sweet. We need everyones eyeballs on this, so please repost, retweet etc.

BarCamp is NINE days away!

Dan — Thu, 21 May 2009 09:41:23 +0000

T minus NINE DAYS until its time to camp, folks!

Here are the basics:

Sign up here: http://barcampsd5.eventbrite.com/
Check out or contribute to our wiki here: http://barcampsd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Here’s some more

We made our budget numbers!
There is room for another 119 people (right this second)
We have enterprise grade wifi for the event! (Aruba provided)
We still need an Intuit employee to spend the night so that we can spend the night there.
We need an accurate count in eventbrite. It looks like some people double and triple signed up. Could you check your registration to see if we have an accurate head count?

We’ll provide more updates here as they become available.

BarCamp Needs your help!

Dan — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:01:12 +0000

Howdy Barcampers!

So we’re about 30 days out and the numbers are in – we’re still short on funds so we’ve started taking up a collection to try and make our figures.

We’ve setup a Fundable.com account to collect donations to make our figures. Fundable is awesome because if the figure we’re looking for isn’t reached – nobody pays a dime. If the figure IS reached, then everyone pays.

Alternatively, if you’d like to make a direct donation, or if you work for a company that would benefit from sponsoring barcamp (read: any company), have any questions about what sort of awesome incentives there are for sponsoring a barcamp or are wondering how much value there is in sponsorship – drop us a line at sponsors@barcampsd.org!

BarCamp San Diego 5 is a go!

Dan — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:52:07 +0000

Howdy Campers! Its been 6 months and it’s time for another BarCamp! This seasons BarCamp will be held at Intuit again! The last event went over smashingly well and Intuit warmly welcomed us back.

Here are some details:

WHEN: May 30th and 31st
WHERE: Intuit Campus, Carmel Valley
HOW: With Cashy money! We’re still looking for sponsorship!

We’re currently working on a new system for registration so that nobody has to mess with the wiki markup anymore, and we’ve actually set up our own wiki so that we are fully in control of our own documentation.(www.barcampsd.org/wiki – you must register to make changes).

Thats it for now! Any help you guys can lend us a hand by spreading the word about the event and sending potential sponsors our way (have them email sponsors@barcampsd.org) would be greatly appreciated!

Stay tuned for more info soon!

Barcamp SD 4 post mortem

Dan — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:17:08 +0000

Barcamp went off without a hitch, as per the norm and everyone that I talked to had a most excellent time. There was the typical nuissance of there being too many people on one wireless access point (internet slower than preferred, range issues), so conversations were had with some folks about getting our hands on some true enterprise grade wireless (cisco aironet or aruba hardware), that has the capacity to properly load balance and distribute traffic across multiple radios. I did however save a whole bunch of data from the firewall, which was a different configuration than last time. I’ll have a post written up about that on shortly.

Defcamp (the hacking challenge) went off fairly well – the contest is a race to the finish and it was started on Saturday morning – so a handful of people basically holed up in an office and missed barcamp to do the hacking challenges. I’m going to have to work on that. I don’t want people missing out on barcamp because of a prize.

The food was greek this time, and was executed superbly – I think we(barcampsd) made a new friend. Daphnes greek cafe in 4s ranch area – we got a hell of a deal and were promised more of a deal next time around.

Intuit was pleased with our presence and smiled because we left the place cleaner than we found it. There are already talks to have barcamp held there again.

All in all, chalk it up to another awesome barcamp. San Diego’s community is getting a reputation for being awesome and this can do nothing but help us. Keep being awesome, everyone!