Why is the Wireless internet at DrupalCon DC unreliable?
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Why is the Wireless internet at DrupalCon DC unreliable?
Submitted by Khalid on Fri, 2009/03/06 - 00:43The "curse of the DrupalCon" continues ...
Which one? The fact that wireless is always an issue, perhaps at least in the North American DrupalCons of late.
At Boston, we had severe issues. Narayan Newton and David Strauss re-wired the conference to use the presenters' connection. That helped a bit, but if I remember correctly there was another issue after that (bandwidth, fake DDoS detection or something).
Now in Washington DC, the internet is still unreliable. Why you ask?
Here is why: The DHCP lease for the IP is very short: less than 5 minutes!
Look at this:
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
DHCPOFFER of 10.34.3.198 from 10.34.0.4
DHCPREQUEST of 10.34.3.198 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 10.34.3.198 from 10.34.0.4
bound to 10.34.3.198 -- renewal in 254 seconds.
Then this:
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
DHCPOFFER of 10.34.3.198 from 10.34.0.4
DHCPREQUEST of 10.34.3.198 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 10.34.3.198 from 10.34.0.4
bound to 10.34.3.198 -- renewal in 256 seconds.
At the hotel, they are more generous with the DHCP IP lease, but not with the signal strength and bandwidth, 32kBps, reminds me of dialup days from eons past ...
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPOFFER of 10.1.10.111 from 10.1.10.2
DHCPREQUEST of 10.1.10.111 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 10.1.10.111 from 10.1.10.2
bound to 10.1.10.111 -- renewal in 12672 seconds.
The other issue is that to get connected, you have to use your browser which is then redirected to the provider's home page. For some reason the site is very slow. Perhaps a Slashdot effect from many hundreds of people hitting it hard all the time ...
So, not much can be done about this misconfiguration ...
Sometimes just do a reconnect, if you are patient enough while the slashdotted gateway serves you again ...
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If you talk to BlackWell they
If you talk to BlackWell they will tell you that another big part of the problem is that they have atleast 1,800 active connections at any one time. This does not include the couple hundred of people who have little netbooks like mine that don't have an N-capable wireless connection. They said the infrastructure can handle more but the more common B and G wireless cards cannot handle the dense "radio noise."
josh
The lease time is not the problem
The lease time shouldn't affect the network througput.
What is probably the reason is that you all are using the same 2.4gigaHertz band on the WLAN nodes. A band that is crowded with network disturbing sources.
Check if there are nodes that can use the A-band (5 gigaHertz) with channels 36 and up. If you can switch to that you should get better throughput as long as the uplink is not congested.
/BoK
If you have 802.11n wireless
If you have 802.11n wireless cards, use them. N was designed for this type of environment and does not have nearly the noise interference issues of G. It seems that the access points have plenty of back end bandwidth but the amount of G devices is overwhelming the access points for those bands.
j
Looking good today ...
For what it's worth ...
Today, in the Acquia room, I have been connected solid with no issues for 2 continuous hours.
Go figure ...
Not sure it's N enabled
According to my laptop, it's connected with a G connection even though it supports A and N as well. They might be using N hardware which can't support both N and G connections at the same time.
Even if it's overwhelmed by the number of devices, I think it's not unreasonable, as they expected at least 2100 active devices (1400 people, half with 2 devices).
For what it's worth, I had no
For what it's worth, I had no problems at all on my white Macbook.
For the entire three days?
For the entire three days? No problems? In ANY of the rooms?
Wow, consider yourself lucky then?
No, issues here either
While I see others having issues, I did not have a single issue all 3 days and had my laptop always connected. It was fast and responsive and never disconnected.
There were a couple differences between me and others, but I don't know if they had anything to do with that. My laptop was in one room 147A the for the whole conference and I did not try to connect elsewhere. Also I have N but it was connected to the net on G.
I was running ubuntu with an
I was running ubuntu with an 802.11b wireless card, and it was 100% impossible to connect.
Basically had no 'net access the entire conference.
I don't know much about networking, or wireless, but I noticed that the folks with macs had perfect connectivity, and everyone else was pretty much screwed.
I used Kubuntu, but G
I was on wireless G, using Kubuntu. The first 2 days was very very unstable. The third day and after were much better.
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