Re: [Debconf-team] Network at Le Camp and a few questions to those who previously did the network at DebConf
Hi
Axel Beckert <abe@deuxchevaux.org> writes:
> The ISP though doesn't yet offer IPv6. So we'll need a tunnel. So my
> questions to the team members who handled network at Debconfs before:
>
> * How have IPv6 tunnels been handled before at DebConfs?
> * Do we have "our own" tunnel and tunnel broker or at least a
> preferred tunnel broker for that? (If not, I'd take SixXS.)
This has been done by Philipp Kern at DC12. If it helps I can organize
an IPv6 subnet to be announced by the ISP. But I guess that the main
problem is that they don't have any IPv6 connectivity yet, so this won't
help.
>
> Some of the houses only have wireless connection though (via wireless
> bridges / a mesh network), especially those which we have during
> DebCamp. The WiFi is managed centrally by the ISP. But they'll switch
> it from the current open network with captive portal (landing page) to
> a WPA secured network with our own ESSID during DebConf.
>
> A participant of the current event at Le Camp who recognized the
> Debian swirl on my t-shirt :-) told me though that the WiFi is
> partially quite flakey and you get disconnected often. Actually it
> happened to me, too, several times while writing this mail over
> SSH/Mosh. But I'm sitting also downstairs while the WiFi antennas in
> the main building are upstairs.
This is most probably because their captive portal is *very* dumb. It
does not do any monitoring of your traffic and just unconditionally
cut's your connection after some amount of time (whether idle or not).
I'm quite sure this will go away if the captive portal is removed.
>
> We may also need some WiFi to ethernet bridges for one or two
> hacklabs, i.e. devices whose upstream connection is wireless and which
> provide ethernet connection to other devices.
[...]
>
> So another set of questions to the team members who handled network at
> previous Debconfs:
>
> * Who brought the WiFi access points in the past? Can those devices
> (or others) be brought again, too, to extend the existing
> WiFi infrastructure?
The wifi hardware list for DC12 is in the wiki [1]. I think the 8
Buffalo WR-G54 devices were left in Nicaragua as a donation and the
other Buffalo was a private device of network team member. But the
TP-Link devices should be with the videoteam stuff. Can someone confirm
this?
> * Can they be configured to do just bridging?
We used OpenWRT on all devices and it's easy to configure these for
bridgeing. You can also do all sorts of other non standard
configurations most proprietary firmwares don't support with OpenWRT
(like VLAN tagging and untagging, funny routing, ...)
> * Anyone has experience with connecting ethernet switches over
> wireless?
Nope. And I agree with Phil Hands that at least for the official
Hacklabs we should really try to build the "backbone" on wired ethernet.
Just keep in mind that the "air will get really packed" once 300 geeks
connect all their devices over wifi. And we only have one air (ok, about
3 useable channels on 802.11bg, but still). Compared this to switched
ethernet where you have basically no collisions.
Gaudenz
[1] https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf12/Wireless#Hardware_list
>
> Regards, Axel, sitting in Bâtiment Principal (main building) at LeCamp
> --
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