blog o' sphere

[Disclaimer: IANANetwork Engineer. This post is specifically about the end-user experience, or even more specifically about my end-user experience.]

So I recently attended both BSides Leeds and Steelcon. Let's start with BSides Leeds. This was located in Cloth Hall Court, which seems to have some academic affiliation such that wireless internet was provided by eduroam.

I am not an academic and so do not have eduroam credentials. Luckily there were sheets of paper everywhere detailing how to acquire some for the duration. These involved some kind of dance involving sending an SMS. I didn't even attempt this (my phone had no credit for sending SMSes) but I was able to persuade someone who had been through the dance to share with me the creds they had apparently acquired. I promptly wrote these down on the sheet of paper to hopefully save the next person to come along some annoyance. (Is this kind of credential-sharing frowned upon? I don't even know but I had a vague sense of unease the whole time, as though I was somehow doing something wrong even though I was just trying to gain connectivity for myself and help others who came after me do the same.)

Ultimately it was moot though, as my laptop simply hung when connecting to eduroam without asking for wifi creds at all. No of course there were no diagnostics why would there be?

There were also ethernet jacks in the wall. These gave me an IPv6 address that didn't route anywhere and then went down after thirty seconds. Apparently they also required some kind of dance that my laptop was not performing. No sheets of paper this time. I had no network connectivity the entire conference.

Two weeks later I went to Steelcon. This was hosted at an actual academic institution (Sheffield Hallam University) and so eduroam again.

This time the sheets of paper dotted around picked a different approach. If you weren't using eduroam you could connect to the Sky wifi network where there was a URL you could visit to register for a free guest wifi account. The thought of having to wade through corporate bullshit to get on the network immediately made my heart sink. Ultimately I failed at the first hurdle, reaching their marketing-heavy landing page but not seeing how to progress further. Pretty soon I gave up on Sky wifi.

But, a miracle! My friend Bonzi was able to hook me up with some eduroam creds. It was at this point that I discovered the reason for my recent BSides eduroam failure, namely that I already had some stale eduroam creds that I'd apparently needed for the previous BSides Leeds in 2020. (Why this authentication failure was not communicated up the stack is a mystery to me, but I was running an absolutely vanilla Xubuntu installation.)

And slowly, as I dusted off old neurons, a memory of the network connectivity at that event surfaced: having to use 3G to get my home ssh server to listen on a different port because port 22 was blocked. (I seem to recall I picked 465, which IANA allocated to SMTP-over-TLS.)

Happily port 22 was not blocked this time, but ICMP was, which threw me briefly because who doesn't check their internet is working by pinging google?

And, finally, life was good. But, man...

Internet connectivity should be a given. It should not require a separate already-connected device to set up. It should not be an excuse for marketing. It should not rely on you being affiliated with any particular organization to make it easy, or to make it work at all. In particular it should not depend on who you know who can help you out. Blocking arbitrary ports and protocols just causes people headaches: in particular port 22 not working at a hacker con is ridiculous.

By contrast, here's how to do it right. Here's the Network page on the EMFcamp 2022 wiki (mirror, because it'll undoubtedly change by the time the next EMF comes along in 2024).

And here's what I like about that page:

• There's a wiki page! Tells you everything you need to know, before the event.
• Creds are simple, memorable and easy to type. (Bonzi's eduroam creds were around two dozen characters, including fun ones such as @. Happily I had an actual laptop with keyboard, but I still managed to make a typo.)
• You can set up your headless Pi or internet-connected paperweight or other random IoT widget in advance. You don't need a web browser on the device. No captive portals. No "be sure to agree to the terms and conditions". No "we'll need your email address". No "you like cookies, right?". No hoops of any kind. Ten seconds, done.
• The following text: "We operate an unfiltered network that is wide open to the Internet. There is no NAT, and everybody has a public IP address. This is our definition of "network neutrality" - a network that doesn't do anything whatsoever to your IP connection." This is so freaking rare these days. I didn't take advantage of this personally but simply reading that text instantly communicated to me that this network is run by passionate people who believe in the principle of end-to-end transparency that the internet was built around and that made it the world-changer it is today: in the event of a problem I would have full confidence the organizers had my back. I encountered no problems whatsoever. Let's not forget this was in a field in the middle of nowhere. Mad, mad respect, guys.

I had a similarly stellar experience with the network at CCC the twice I've been.