FOSS4G'13

Probably 8080 if it's not open anyway

9410 for git
3690 for SVN

I think we may be in a slight quandary here. While we can say which ports we would like released we may not get them all. @Jeremy thoughts? Engineering ITS?

If we dont ask we dont get. Its not like its a massive range (one of our network admins was always happy to open the odd port here and there for students to game on their Xboxes, but refused to open a range of something like 16384 ports on the student residence network which one particular game insisted on needing).
I think the bigger concern is capacity.
Are these requirements for the conference centre, the GeoCamp tent and the workshop labs and other spaces?

All here is an email from ITS:
___

Dear Mark, 

Looking at the connection info it is likely to be because the ports are blocked

You can get ports unblocked by filling in the attached form (1 form per port/system)

Once returned we can pass this to the network team for them to assess

____

I was given a form to fill in (attached).

Distilling from this a potential approach will be to require attendees to register MAC addresses. However, even though we can come up with a list of mac addresses and port numbers we would still need to anticipate that there will be MAC addresses which will be new (people change tech before/during a conference) and we may not be able to anticipate all the port numbers required. 

This rests on whether internet will be supplied by De Veres or the University. Once we know this we can formulate a plan of attack.

Could I suggest we try and arrange a meeting between Notts Confs, UoN IS, AGI & on or two of us, maybe on the Thursday at the end of GeoCom next week, to discuss?  Face-to-face discussion feels like it will be more productive.

We can meet with Shelley and Heather on Thursday afternoon after conference has finished.

Can we have a list of the main questions we want to ask before we go to the meeting?

Kind regards

Claire

Claire Huppertz, Events Manager

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Questions For Shelly:

Who will be providing the internet?
What will the bandwidth and anticipated throughput be?
What ports will be open?
Which ports are explicitly blocked?
What restrictions are placed upon the network by the service provider (user registration, number of devices, etc.)

I think this is more the start than the end of the questions!

We need to find a way to progress this discussion. I suspect Mark is being treated like just another PhD student in some of the discussion. I could step in but I think we need to push on a bit, and an F2F meeting here might help push things along to actually find out what the IT people can/can't and will/won't do for us.

I'd suggest that Claire, me, Mark, Shelley and at least one IT person comes - possibly Steven / Jo / Matt / Barry if they want the day trip.

We could possibly combine this with contract discussions.

(I've widened the cc list a bit on this to add Jo & Steven for reference).

Jeremy

I totally agree. I think an F2F sounds like the best way forward- and personally I think Steven needs to be there. Whether the additional person needs to be myself, Barry, Matt, I don't know and I don't mind particularly!

What we do need from Mark, Matt et al, is an idea of which ports are required, which ports it would be nice to have, and some idea of potential work arounds. I don't think we can ask for everything under the sun without setting out our requirements a bit more clearly.

Jo

Hi,

Sorry for not chipping in earlier. Ian, Mark and myself spoke about this briefly at AGI.

I was catching up with Jamie Justham and he suggested looking for a partner or sponsor such as BT who could provide tech conference strength wifi. I think this a great idea as I personally doubt that the current conference wifi will be sufficient especially when we look to extend to the tent.

The next action was for Ian to ask around at the OS for suitable contacts in BT or similar that we may be able to approach as a first step.

If initially we want to pursue the conference wifi then I'm happy to help with the requirements but I'm not going to be able to make a F2F in the next few weeks due to work commitments.

Thanks,

Matt.

I think the wifi sponsor is in principle a good idea but has practical difficulties in that the location is buried in the university's campus. We'll therefore need support of the uni for any wifi sponsor to get the broadband link(s) into the site.

Also, if the venue aren't providing the main wifi, then we need to negotiate the contract accordingly, for example to reduce the fee on that basis.

For all these reasons we need pretty quickly to work out what's possible from the venue, either in terms of the wifi itself or in terms of getting another provider into the site. We need to have this covered off before we can close any deals with sponsors. (In my view at least).

Jeremy

I am happy to come up to Nottingham for F2F meetings with Shelley on contract finalisation (but we must have a draft in hand before meeting) and to sort out the internet stuff (will need backup from someone who knows what they are talking about)

Claire can you chase Shelley and get some prospective dates in next couple of weeks

I was at an internal IT user group meeting today and made a very valuable contact with one of the guys in IT (Andrew Shearsmith) who is in charge, for example, of the project to replace the current UoN-Guest & -Secure system with a single sign-on WiFi access method. He's asked for details of what we're after for FOSS4G (as well, Mark, as information on what may or may not be blocked now on Secure) & will investigate for us.

Since this has already been handed on from direct contact with Shelley I presume it's ok for me to pursue.

That is a big result Jeremy. Can you and/or Mark progress this and maybe give us a bit of feedback on Monday's call.

Yup, I've emailed the guy. I'll let you know of any progress.

Awesome result Jeremy. I'll liaise with you about further issues!

Just catching up on this thread, I think you probably all know this but I just wanted to reiterate that network capacity is the biggest concern I would have. We went over and over this with the venue in Denver, and they assured us that they'd handled WiFi successfully for similar size events before and it wouldn't be a problem. But FOSS4G folks are heavy network users and we had quite a few issues with overloading the network / people not being able to connect. This was the number one complaint about the Denver event (even though at any given time, probably 90+% of people were connected with no problem, but those who can't connect at any point complain loudly!).