NDNA: May 2024 Freeform

good morning everybody and welcome back to next door nedman it is the end of another month it is the end of the month of May and that means it is time for a free form video but you'll have already noticed I'm in a very different place than I usually would be so where am I and what am I doing well first of all the place it's a hotel room I know hard to believe that I could actually ever go to a hotel all it guys are supposed to stay inside usually in the basement right yeah not always cool but what am I doing here well I have been helping out with a convention from Thursday all the way through to when I'm recording this Sunday night and okay but what what have I've been doing it's not a stretch to imagine that a lot of what I've been doing has been it related and in fact it has been I have been assisting not leading but assisting with it for this particular convention and specifically my area of focus has been the central server and database for the convention so that's everything that works with attendee registrations that has been uh uh everything to do with logging tasks logging lost and found items pulling all the information the stuff that helps power the decisions and experiences of a lot of the people who come through here so that they can get their badge move on to some of the other events and enjoy themselves so there's a lot that goes into that this isn't the the best place to get into all of the details on that particularly because since I'm on the road I don't really have a lot of editing capability to be able to do a lot of Show and Tell or to illustrate any of the uh stuff that I would talk about but I can tell you that a large part of what this is built on is just a traditional lamp stack what's a lamp stack a lamp stack is a term that is used to include uh an operating system Linux that's the L uh Apache which is a particular web server then there's MySQL which is your actual database and then there's PHP which is a dynamic language to help generate web pages that are pulling information out of the mySQL database I'm not going to go into all of the details on that particularly in a free form which is supposed to be more free form and less uh discussion based but that being said it has been a decent convention it has been a very popular convention we just doubled in size from the last year and that's not something anybody was really expecting up until about a month ago so there's definitely growing pains when you jump in size that dramatically because you don't jump in the number of volunteers that you have by that corresponding percentage you you you don't you hope that you're growing your volunteers you you hope you're growing with the number of people that are helping uh run this for all of the people who are coming and enjoying it that being said you don't expect to grow your entire staff your your set of volunteers you don't expect to grow that by a 100% in a year you don't expect that to double but we just had our attendees double so yeah it it gets challenging that's a word I'm going to use it gets challenging at times but still all in all I would say a very rewarding experience and that's that's the biggest thing is it's rewarding to be able to work with a bunch of people in putting something like this on and it's rewarding when you know that the attendees the people who are just coming to the convention to enjoy the convention when you know that they had a good time to when you know that you've been able to make somebody's year by being able to say yes we have this lost item in our lost and found it was recorded here it is and they go oh my God this was something that was 10 years old and it was really important to me and you found it thank you so much something as simple as that can bring such a moment of Happiness both to the person who is receiving the item that they had lost but also to the people who are able to assist and correspondingly to the people who set up the entire skeleton structure of the network who set up the server who set up all the systems involved it's rewarding for everybody and that's a good thing a little bit more about the systems that we have here we everything is run on laptops including the server um so it makes it a self-contained server which is fun cuz it's got its own screen it's got a keyboard and cool it also makes it easy to transport which is a plus as well but since everything is on laptops it makes it really easy to be able to pack things up at night and bring them into a secured location for storage so you're not leaving your systems out over night for anybody walking through the hotel we had I want to say easily six or seven workstations for processing registrations and another four that we had for attendees to go through and then we had another four or five for operations uh where people are tracking things like the lost and found open tasks needed items needed equipment and yeah along with that we have four going to say four full page printers your standard laser Jets they just print regular 8 and 1 half by 11 printer uh printer paper yeah uh but we also have four label printers that specifically print out um 3in by 1 in sticky labels that you just peel off and and stick on things that's how we do our attendee Badges and we also have uh credit card terminals for processing payment and those require their own specialized setup and receipt paper for the receipts and all the fun stuff that comes with dealing with payment terminals because those have their own set of requirements that are over and above shall we say what the rest of the network needs and of course then you need to have a few switches to tie everything together in various locations you need a router to interface between your internal Network and then the hotel Network the hotel gave us a public a static public IP address this year but in other years sometimes it's uh a dynamic IP and when it's a dynamic IP the hotel has a captive portal because most hotels do have a captive portal these days but it's not easy to be able to authenticate through that so then you need to know that you need to get a MAC address you need to ask the hotel to pass or whitelist the MAC address through their captive portal so that it's not blocked if you have an isolated payment terminal as an example away on the other side of the hotel and it's not attached to your internal network setup you may need to take other measures like getting that station's Mac address passed through the captive portal as well making sure that you're still abiding by all the requirements necessary for the payment terminals of course and then you get into things like WiFi well isn't everybody on the hotel Wi-Fi most of the time yes but if you have a need for wireless devices to run on the internal Network then you have to make sure that you have wireless access points set up as well it's surprising how a lot of this is invisible to most attendees once you're outside of registration everybody sees the computers that are in registration but a lot of the understanding of how exactly do you set this all up how do you cart this in this particular organization a I've been working with has in the past used a variety of different systems we've had laptops that ran windows we have had raspberry pies we've had thin clients wise Terminals and for those of you who don't know that's uh spelled w Ys y's Terminals and these terminals typically had just a remote desktop client that's all they were intended for was to remote desktop into a Mainframe somewhere but most of them also just had a web browser and all we really needed was a web browser because it just has to reach the internal web server that runs everything so those worked fine and you could get them secondhand for very low amounts of money because they didn't have a full operating system they couldn't run office applications definitely could not run games all they could do was a remote desktop connection or a web browser that was it it was kind of I suppose a little bit like Chrome os's these days where everything is very heavily browser based but don't take my word on that because I have not used Chrome OS and so that's going entirely on supposition on my part but we now have laptops that run Linux again all we really need for the most part is a browser and anything that's capable of running a browser will work with that we used to have big big totes full of keyboards and wired mice and everything like that so that people aren't having to work on a really cramped keyboard so much on a laptop or for a device like a raspberry High it doesn't have a built-in keyboard so you better Supply one so you have keyboards you have mice you have um zillion power cables you have even more ethernet cables helpfully stowed in a box that with a label that says all the cats I think it may have started as all the Cat 5 but given that we now have cat 5e and category 6 and maybe even a little 6A nowadays who am I kidding we don't have any 6A here never mind but it's still now all the cats all right fine the way that these things are labeled is just funny sometimes regardless you have all these boxes all this equipment and then you basically haul everything into a hotel when you actually have clearance to do so you your time block has begun and you spend a good 4 to 6 hours setting everything up cabling it all making sure that all the cables are taped down so that there's no tripping hazards making sure that you're running around through doorways tape it down and then you're running it around the walls and setting up an ad hoc network on the Fly that just lasts for the three days of the convention and then on Sunday night you tear it all back out again you roll up all the cables you stow it in the um in the back in the boxes that it came from and you call it good you we've we've done it all for another year now it's all going back in storage all the power cables all the power strips all the cats all the laptops those typically do not go to a storage locker we have different secured storage for that the label printers those also tend to go to specialized storage because those are a little more specialized equipment and we don't want to put it in a general Locker full of everything else and then you have the full page printers which are generally speaking pretty Hardy although you do need to make sure that you still keep them fed with uh changes of toner or new cartridges or new other parts just the kind of regular things that you would expect printers to need yeah easy enough and if you're hearing some odd noises from off camera I'm also sharing this hotel room with a dog it's not mine but I do not mind having a dog nearby so that is a traveling companion shall we say ah yeah no that's that's the that's the challenges that's the fun of it and do I find it rewarding I find it rewarding to be involved more than anything I do obviously enjoy it it's what I'm good at it's what I do at my day job so that's fun oh I could also tell you about some of the fun things that I've done in other events not this one but at other events at other events we had uh a network that was broad enough that it needed to be located in several very discontiguous areas of a convention center and a hotel so what we would do is we would ask the hotel to Pro essentially provide us a VLAN through their infrastructure but if you're passing sensitive data over a network that isn't yours to control do you trust your sensitive information to that network if you're a network admin and you've got equipment to play with for fun because this is all volunteer work so it had better be fun on some level then what do you do you create a VPN you create a VPN between each and every endpoint that might be four or five different routers and you have to use different subnets because it's all going through different vpns over a different you know Wan essentially that is the hotel's Network at this point you build your routing tables you do all of that stuff there's even been one or two instances where a particularly tricky distance was not cable by the hotel's Network and so in those cases we would even look at using uh Wireless relay stations to relay a wireless signal by bouncing it off the the back um a back rock wall essentially at the back of a parking lot that didn't really pan out so what we ended up doing instead was getting a pair of you know older Cisco routers that had T1 teleph phone cards in them and then we cabled together parts of the hotel's internal telephone network with their permission obviously and created our own mini T1 line essentially from one end of the hotel to the other wasn't very fast a T1 was only 1.5 megabit but it also didn't need to be that fast because we're not passing bucket loads of data here we're doing just single web pages and it was for a very very very small amount of traffic and so that worked out but these are the kinds of Creative Solutions that you have to be able to wrap your head around and approach and brainstorm and come up with new ways of making things work because because in a volunteer organization you can't go out and buy the latest and greatest nor do you really want to if you have an event that only runs for three or 4 days out of a year and then has everything packed into storage why would you go out and buy stuff that's new it doesn't make a lot of sense particularly for a volunteer or nonprofit organization so secondhand material are just what you use would I ever Advocate that in a business context obviously not in a business context you need to find some budget to actually support the business but if you're talking about a nonprofit or volunteer run event that only runs three days out of the year you don't have a full budget to work with you just got to be creative and you got to be a creative shop Sher going to used PC recycling places and finding castoffs and asking maybe even asking businesses if they have anything that is so old that they just want to donate it instead of e-ting it to a recycler I've already talked about e-ting before this is another way that it can be used so yeah there's a lot of creativity that comes in building and configuring a network not only to suit the needs of the specific event but also to match whatever venue you're in because every hotel is different every Convention Center is different you just got to be able to go into it make a plan and then when you roll in you have to be able to adapt you have to be able to think on your feet and problem solve and come up with ways of making something work that's that's all there is to it so that's what I've been doing over the last few days and hopefully that has been somewhat interesting to you as well I will be back at home for the next video so until that time thank you very much for watching I am your next door nadman and we'll see you next time

Channel: NextDoorNetAdmin

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Id: xFNmqFsQEzA

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Mon May 27 2024