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

[Steve Crocker <[e-mail]>]

Yes, stress testing the capacity of the hotel network is different from testing the functionality.  I suspect there are ways of doing this that don’t require occupying several hundred rooms.  But there’s no need to solve all problems at once.  If the IETF develops a regime for testing the functionality of the hotel networks and reporting the results in an organized fashion, I imagine there will be iterative improvements in the process over time, including clever ways of estimating the capacity.

Steve

On Jul 25, 2014, at 9:29 AM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> 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).
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
>