Assembly network info

The Assembly network and anything related to it is handled by Assemly's own network team Netcrew. We are mostly located at the NOC (dressing room 4 near the public showes and saunas). During the day the Netinfo is located at the Info desk next to the main entrance. At nights and during the "quiet time", you can contact us by Info's people or at the NOC.

While we are building a network to thousands of computers/users, there are a lot of facts that the users don't see. You can find those facts and some more information of the Assembly network on this page.

Preparations

The Assembly Netcrew -team starts the preparations months before the actual party. These preparations include for example things like finding out the network needs of all participants, configuring and testing of all the equipment and planning the gabling and placing of the equipment. Building of the planned party network starts few days before the party. So that when the arena doors open, the network is ready to be used by wireless connections or wired connections all around the whole Hartwall arena.

This website provides also some information of the Netcrew; what do we do and why. Here should also be all the important new information of the networks current state during the whole event.

If you want to see the Netcrew in action, click here to see some pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/netcrew/

Netcrew in and during the event

If you have network related questions or problems or you need to know something about the party network, please don't hesitate to contact us! We are the guys wearing green organizer shirts. During the party the easiest way to reach us is at the Netinfo which is located in the dressing room 4 near the public showers and saunas. If you don't find us there, you may try the Info next to the main entrance and they will contact us. You can also email us: noc@assembly.org but during the event the email is read only randomly. Don't forget that you might find an answer to your questions from this page!

Diagnosing the bugs (problems)

You're network isn't working? Things you should check BEFORE contacting the Netinfo: Is the network working at all or is it just too slow or works occasionally? Ask the people near you if they have any problems with the network? Do you use wireless or wired connection? If you are the only one with the problem, the problem is most likely in your equipment. But if you still think the problem is in the network, please contact us at Netinfo or while netinfo is closed, use the Info. Of course we can also try to help you if the problem is with your computer.

Sometimes we have to start looking for a certain computer in the network that seems to have a virus or other malware that it's spreading around. We can also find out if someone is spreading spam. We can locate any computer by their IP-addresses or MAC addresses and know where it is placed.

All the network equipment are actively monitored and we find out quickly if any of them break or have some kind of a problem. When this happens, we usually send someone to check the situation on-site. First we check the power source and the cabling and then we reboot the device. If those actions show no effect, we will replace the device. Sometimes it is possible that the management environment shows that the device is working fine, but it still doesn't work for the end-user or all the way around.

Status of the network

Here you can find the current status of the network during the event.

About the network

Elisa/Saunalahti provides this event a 10Gbit/s internet connection and a 1Gbit/s a backup connection. The Assembly network is planned and executed by the Assembly's own network team the Netcrew.

Backbone network and guest network

As the core of the backbone network is Cisco 6509 (asm-gw) router which is linked to the internet connection and arena level's Cisco 4948-10G (a-sw, b-sw, c-sw and d-sw) aggregation switches as a ring that operates at the speed of 10Gbit/s. 171 of table switches (Zyxel ES-3024) are connected to these core devices with links of 1Gbit/s. These switches were donated to the Assembly organization. Quest network's table switches include 4275 gates which can be used by the end-users.

Organizer network

The event has a lot of locations around the arena that has a need of an internet connection. These places have for example IP-phones which are used by all the organization crews to communicate with each other, sponsor stands and Asembly-tv which is streamed to the internet. There is about 35 switches, which have over 700 gates, around the arena. These are used by the organization and sponsors of this huge event.

WLAN

We also have a wireless connection which is executed by using Cisco's 4400 wlan controllers and 27 access points. With this equipment we can cover almost the whole arena with A, B and G standard's wireless connection. WLAN network's speed is defined by user group and there is also a firewall which allows connections only to ssh(22), http(80), https(443) and irc(6667). This way we try to provide everyone a well working internet connection. Wireless connection is not meant as a primary connection, it is only an additional service. There are two wireless networks for the Assembly users: Assembly and Assembly-A. Assembly works on B, G and A standard's frequencies and Assembly-A works on A frequency. The A standard's frequency works the best in this event because there is a lot of interference in the B and G frequency. Your computer's wireless network card might prefer using the B/G frequency as a default. We have two networks so that we can avoid the overcrowding in the B/G frequency. So you are better of using the A frequency! :) If your computer don't find the Assembly-A network your computer's network card doesn't support it.

What's been going on this year?

On Thursday morning, before the doors opened for public, we had still a few tasks to complete, mainly concerning a few issues in the PartyNet.

For starters, we had a bit of a problem with our core fibers, no matter how hard we tried we couldn't get both of our planned 10Gbps main lines from the core router, ASM-GW to Hartwall Arena up and running, so we had to revert to our backup plan. Run the primary link as 10Gbps and the secondary as a 1Gbps backup line. Considering the bandwith usage of Assembly, this change really shouldn't affect the performance from the end-user point of view. As long as the primary line stays up.

After completing the topology change above, we could finish up on our testing plan and we were good to go, the PartyNet was up and running and the party could begin.

After the doors opened we noticed a big problem in the Organizer segment of PartyNet. LiveCrews multicast traffic was flooding the network in such a manner it tore down our IP Phones. It seems our IGMP configuration wasn't functioning as planned, it should've limited the flood. Well some quick fixes and the problem's gone, phones are once again operational.

To our bad luck, that wasn't the end of it for Thursday. As many of you users might have noticed, we had a minor glitch in a configuration script in the Visitor network. This minor glitch just happened to remove a few VLAN ID's (Virtual Local Area Network) from our ASM-GW, resulting in losing all connectivity to the Internet from the PartyNet.

And then there was and is the everlasting problem of the WLAN. For starters, the Harwall Arena is a truly challenging enviroment to build a wireless network. There is the "built in" WLAN, Telia Homerun which we cannot turn off for the event, so we have to live side-by-side with it. And then the Arena itself, not the easiest one to cover fully. ...in two days of time with limited equipment.

So the WLAN was up and running and as thoroughly tested as humanly possible

with the equipment and software available. And still, as you, the party visitors started arriving it didn't take that long for the first problems to arise. Luckily the problems were mostly solvable by optimizing the configuration, resulting in a rather stable and usable WLAN around the Arena. The 5GHz A-network has been working excellently all the time though. Use that, if your hardware supports it.

Early friday morning, thursday night even, we started to receive a few packets from the outside world. A few meaning over 600000 packages per second, constantly. This - my friends - was what they call an attempt to overload our border router by the means of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Luckily we had anticipated something like this to happen and have set up our equipment in a secure way with configurations specifically tailored to handle these kinds of common attacks. So in the end... Even with a reasonably good try like this, none of you users noticed a thing.

Later on friday we decided to build up the IPv6 connectivity to the Internet. Most of the configuration was already done previously so now we just needed an IPv6 resolver and we're good to go.

On Friday, things pretty much settled down and since that, Netcrew has been running the normal operations. Helping party visitors with different kinds of networking problems and building up an old Pentium 2 based PC just to install Windows 7 and play Quake...

Rest assured dear Visitors, the PartyNet is in good hands. Fully operational and waiting to be used.

Oh and one thing, if you're interested of the PartyNet in greater detail, do pay a visit to our Network Operations Center, NOC. It's located on the Arena-level in the same corridor as the showers but on the opposite side. The signs say "Netinfo".