Re: Hotel networks (Was Re: Security for the IETF wireless network)

[Steve Crocker <[e-mail]>]

I’m not at this IETF meeting and I’m not referring to the current hotel network.  In the past, I’ve encountered all sorts of restrictions and limitations.  Also, there is often a big difference between the main hotel and the others.  In Maastricht, for example, I stayed at what was apparently a dorm hotel and I could not get access to nonstandard ports, e.g. for SSL protected access to my email.

Steve

On Jul 25, 2014, at 9:40 AM, joel jaeggli <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 7/25/14, 9:29 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
>> Steve,
>> 
>> I completely agree with your comment and suggestions (including
>> at least knowing hotel network capabilities in advance of
>> arrival), but note that at least some of the reason while the
>> hotel networks perform so badly under IETF meeting load is that
>> many of them are seriously underprovisioned at multiple points.
>> If the meetings team were to perform simple tests (that we
>> helped design) based on the number of people in that team, they
>> would be likely to get good information about capability
>> limitations (e.g., ports and options) but would be unlikely to
>> get sufficient information about performance under serious load.
>> Clearly, we could figure out how to run a load test, but I
>> assume it would take a lot of cooperation from the hotel (or
>> several hundred of us occupying rooms).
> 
> so,
> 
> We've taken the hotel's captive portal / nat platform /internet service
> out of the path for the residential network for the week. We do this
> where possible, and in cases where we cannot this is typically noted.
> 
> While wifi coverage, lre/dsl and internal topology are out of our
> control, the hotel network is being served by the the IETF network and
> has no restrictions respecting authentication, ports available,
> middleboxes and so forth. There is nothing especially interesting to
> report there.
> 
>> best,
>>    john
>> 
>> 
>> --On Friday, 25 July, 2014 08:09 -0400 Steve Crocker
>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>>> If we're going to discuss hotel networks, encryption of the
>>> channel is nice to have but there are more serious problems.
>>> 
>>> o Many hotel networks restrict the ports that can be reached.
>>> This results in an absolute failure for some of us.
>>> 
>>> o Many hotel networks do not support the full range of options
>>> for DNSSEC.
>>> 
>>> o Many hotel networks have very poor bandwidth and become
>>> overloaded when the IETF comes to town.
>>> 
>>> The meetings team does an excellent job of planning and
>>> running the meetings.  They do extensive investigation of each
>>> proposed meeting site and they do a stellar job setting up and
>>> running the networks at each meeting.  I wish they would also
>>> test the hotel networks in advance and report to all of us the
>>> limitations we're likely to encounter.  And, of course, it
>>> would be pretty easy for a volunteer group of IETFers to
>>> organize a reporting effort too.