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NANOG 36 Network Information

Authentication |Mail Relay | Terminal Room | Ballroom | Wireless | Cache | Multicast/IPv6
RealNetworks Streaming Media | DNS

Connectivity

Yahoo! is providing 40M of high-speed connectivity to the Fairmont, courtesy of the new AT&T.

Network Authentication

Merit's wireless authentication system helps us isolate problems on 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 or the registration 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.

Mail Relay

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

Terminal Room

 NANOG is experimenting with a new format for the Terminal Room in Dallas: instead of equipping a separate room, Yahoo is supplying several laptops and a printer that will be located just outside the Regency Ballroom.

Ballroom

The main ballroom will have tables set up with ethernet ports for laptop users, as well as wireless connectivity.

Wireless Connectivity

 Please read our note about avoiding cleartext passwords on the wireless net.

We hope to get wireless connectivity to the bar area(s), and to the Beer 'n Gear. Connectivity to the Beer 'n Gear is not guaranteed.

Authentication
Merit's wireless authentication system makes 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.

Card Loans
Merit is providing 10 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 nanog .

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, check with the Merit or host 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 NANOG cache uses Squid, a freely available Web proxy cache.

    Multicast

    Multicast and IPv6 connectivity will be provided in one of three ways:

    1. Directly, via the Internet circuit provider.
    2. Via a peering session to a locally routed Internet2 member or affiliate.
    3. Via a tunnel to one of Merit Network's Internet2 border routers.

    NANOG is being multicast using MPEG4 video and audio encoding. An Apple MacMini running QuickTime Broadcaster is being used to encode the broadcast stream. The encoded stream is send via unicast to a QuickTime Streaming Server that rebroadcasts the stream as a multicast 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 source is MPEG-4 (ISMA MPEG-4 ~500Kb/s), dimensions: 320 pixels by 240 pixels. The sdp file describing the multicast stream is at the following location:

    nanogmc.sdp

    nanogmc.mov

    Copy this link and open it in your favorite player (QuickTime, VLC or MPlayer).

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

    RealNetworks Streaming Media 

    NANOG is also being broadcast with RealNetworks' Helix Server. 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.

    DNS

    The DNS server IP addresses for the meeting are: