Drupal Heroes - Narayan Newton and David Strauss

The Boston2008 Drupalcon organizing team hosted a tremendously successful conference last week. One of the sore spots though was the wifi for attendees. This wifi is a free service provided by the BCEC. We were assured that the network routinely works fine for gatherings much larger than ours. Even with that reassurance, the Boston2008 bought our own wired network just for the presenters, in case of wifi problems. And boy were there problems.

We noticed wifi instability as soon as the attendees started arriving. Narayan Newton immediately took charge. Narayan is employed by OSUOSL, the organization who manages the drupal.org infrastructure. Narayan knows networking.

In addition to general bad wifi, drupal.org was impossible to reach from the conference floor. Something was clearly blocking access. Narayan tried to prove to the BCEC network engineers that their NAT infrastructure was doing this. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, they blamed drupal.org or its upstream providers. The BCEC engineer kept suggesting "maybe your IIS is misconfigured." On Tuesday afternoon, the BCEC finally declared "Sorry, we can't fix it unless you pay us $2000 to bring in a new line. That will take us 15 minutes to accomplish."

The Boston2008 team had already decided to pay this ransom but Narayan had a trick up his sleeve. Narayan and our other hero, David Strauss, made an emergency trip to Microcenter and bought 5 Linksys wireless access points, a Thinkcentre for routing/proxy, a switch, and miles of ethernet cable. Then they returned to the BCEC and wired up the whole conference area. This took most of the Tuesday night, while most of us were showing off our alter egos at the Acquia party. When we arrived in the morning, our laptops happily connected to a new Drupalcon wireless network. Narayan and David also provided some hard wired ports that we could plug into for emergency use (i.e. my presentation is in 2 hours. Need speed!).

Instead of buying the new line, Narayan setup QoS on the presenter's network which the Boston2008 team had previously purchased. This way, presenters were guaranteed their bandwidth while attendees could use the same line and only suffer when under heavy load. This wasn't a perfect solution, but it helped a lot.

Cheers to Narayan and David for your heroic efforts that rescued our community from horrible wifi during our conference.