NANOG 31 Network Information

Mail Relay | Terminal Room | Main Room | Wireless | Cache | Multicast 
RealNetworks Streaming Media | IPv6 | DHCP | DNS


Remember to bring your wireless card to the meeting!

NEW - Wireless Authentication

Merit is implementing a new wireless authentication system in San Francisco, to make it easier for us to isolate any problems with the wireless net.

To access the wireless network, launch your browser. You'll be redirected to a gateway server and prompted for your email address. Once registration begins at noon on Sunday, you must enter the email address you used to register for the meeting. If you're not sure what address was used for registration, check with the staff at the wireless desk.

Once you enter your email address, the gateway server will record your assigned DHCP address and MAC address. Your HTTP session will then be redirected to the URL you originally entered in your browser.

Connectivity

The St. Francis is linked to the Internet by a gigabit Ethernet link to CNET's San Francisco data center, using fiber donated by IP Networks, Inc.

Mail Relay

If you need a local mail relay, use smtp.nanog31.merit.net.

Terminal Room

 CNET has equipped the NANOG terminal room with 10 workstations, a printer, outlets and ports for laptop users, and 802.11/802.11b wireless connectivity.

The terminal room is in the Borgia room near the Ballroom, and will be open from Sunday afternoon to the end of the meeting, with 24-hour access. You will need your NANOG badge to enter.

The account on the Unix workstations is: 

  login: nanog
  password: nanog

Main Room

The main ballroom will have tables set up with ethernet ports for laptop users, as well as wireless connectivity. We're also hoping to get wireless connectivity to the bar area(s), and to the Beer 'n Gear. Connectivity to the Beer 'n Gear is not guaranteed.

Wireless Connectivity

 Please read our notes about WIRELESS AUTHENTICATION and avoiding cleartext passwords.

Merit is providing 50 wireless cards for loan to attendees during the meeting. Cards will be available in registration area on Sunday afternoon, and in the main ballroom on Monday and Tuesday.

SSID

The wireless network SSID is nanog31 .

Supported Cards

The network supports 802.11/802.11b-compliant, Direct Sequence, spread 2.4 GHz (DS) cards (2 Mb/s and 11 Mb/s).

Addressing

All wireless addresses for the meeting are in the 192.35.164.0/22 block.

Checking Out a Card

If you already own a wireless card, please feel free to bring it. If you are thinking about buying a wireless card, you should probably get any brand of card that offers IEEE 802.11 compliancy. You'll probably want to get a card that uses Direct Sequence technology, as frequency hopping has a lower maximum theoretical bandwidth (2Mb/s).

Drivers

If the following options are available in your driver, you'll be best served by setting:
  • Access point density high
  • Power saving off
  • Infrastructure/bss mode only
    • Drivers are available on-site on CDs provided with some wireless cards, and on the web: For help installing your card, ask at the wireless desk or check with the Merit staff.

    Squid Cache

    Take advantage of the NANOG Web cache! Traffic analyses from recent meetings show that on average, it's approximately twice as fast to load a page from the cache than from the origin server directly. In addition to saving bandwidth, caching reduces the load on the Web sites you're accessing, and gives you lower latency to overseas hosts.

    Follow these steps to configure your browser to use the cache. The NANOG31 cache uses Squid, a freely available Web proxy cache.

    Multicast

    Nanog 31 will be multicast live from San Francisco. We're changing the stream for this meeting, in that it will be an ISMA MPEG-4 standard multicast stream using the AAC audio codec at 250Kb/s. The stream should be of similar visual quality to the 1Mb/s MPEG-1 stream! Recommended free clients are Quicktime for Windows or Macintosh and MPlayer on Linux or *BSD. The VideoLAN client is able to play back the video on all platforms but the AAC audio properly on only a few of them.

    The multicast sources are:

    MPEG-4 (ISMA MPEG-4 250kb/s)

    Please send feedback or questions about the multicast session to nanog-support@nanog.org

    RealNetworks Streaming Media 

    NANOG 31 is also being broadcast with RealNetwork's RealServer 8.0. The broadcast begins Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. To view the live or archived feeds, you can use RealPlayer 5.0 and above. To watch the meeting live, check the links on the main conference page. If you have questions about the Real Media broadcast, check with the Merit staff or send e-mail to nanog-support@nanog.org.

    IPv6

    All NANOG wireless and terrestrial ethernet ports will be IPv4/IPv6-ready. The NANOG conference site will have native IPv6 connectivity via Merit's link to Abilene/Internet2. You'll want to use IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration (    RFC2462). We do not provide static IPv6 addresses.

    IPv6 implementations for various laptop platforms are available from ipv6.org. If you have questions about v6 connectivity, please check with a Merit/NANOG staff member or send email to nanog-support@nanog.org.

    DHCP

    These graphs show     information from the NANOG DHCP server. The first graph shows the number of IP addresses assigned and the number of MAC addresses making DHCP requests. The second graph shows the rate at which addresses are assigned.

    DNS

    The DNS server IP addresses for the meeting are: