----- Original Message -----
From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>
I find more and more hotel networks are essentially unusable for parts of the day, conference or no. Of course, bring in any geek contingent with multiple devices and heavy usage patterns and the problems get worse.
What I find most interesting is more often than not the problem appears to be an overloaded / undersized NAT/Captive portal/DNS Resolver system. Behaviors like existing connections working fine, but no new ones can be created (out of ports on the NAT?). While bandwidth is occasionally an issue, I've found an ssh tunnel out to some other end point solves the issues in 9 out of 10 cases.
Neither part of that surprises me. :-} I'm *almost* convinced not to NAT IPv4, so far.
I wonder how many hotels upgrade their bandwidth but not the gateway, get a report that their DS-3/OC-3/Metro-E is only 25% used, and think all is well. Mean while half their clients can't connect to anything due to the gateway device.
That's an interesting question indeed. The optimal solution here, of course, would be for Worldcons -- which are planned 3-4 years in advance -- to get the right technical people in the loop with the property to see when in the next 2 years (after a bid is confirmed) they plan to upgrade the networking they have now... and make sure it will tolerate a "real" worst case. The business case for the property, of course, is that they're more salable to large technical conferences -- which makes them more money. Question is, is it enough. Or do I just overlay for the event. Cheers ,-- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274