SHA2017

Hello! This is your NOC team speaking. We’ve been quite busy planning topologies and IP numbering plans, arranging equipment and connectivity and all sorts of other stuff, all in order to make SHA2017 the one place where you won’t be missing your trusted home internet connection. Now that the event is getting closer and we’re in the final stages of our preparations, let us give you an exclusive glimpse into what kind of cat picture delivery infrastructure you can expect at SHA2017.

Overview of the currently planned datenklos position.

No fun without uplink

Obviously, SHA2017 needs a super-fast internet uplink. Camping without internet access simply sucks, and even if only a few dozen geeks go online via 2G/3G (or 4G if you're lucky), the nearby cells will already be fully overloaded. Let alone the 3500 geeks who are expected to visit SHA2017.

Enter Team:NOC (Network Operations Centre), who have been planning, organising and working towards getting the best affordable way of fast internet at the camping ground. Luckily, Scouting Landgoed Zeewolde already has an awesome on- and off-site fibre infrastructure in place, making it the most luxurious camping ground that we’ve ever connected. To link this place to the outside world, we were able to secure a dark fibre uplink to Amsterdam, supplied by UNET.

However, a dark fibre is very nice and all, but it needs light on it to be of any use. We considered several options: Stay old school and run multiple 10Gbit/s links over it, as we’d normally do? Nah. We’ve decided it’s time to step our game up a bit and go straight for a 100Gbit/s link towards Amsterdam. The problem is that the fibre is about 55km long, so a 100Gbit/s link won’t work without some special magic. Luckily Juniper Networks kindly agreed to loan us some nice fibre-optic equipment, which means SHA2017 will actually be the first hacker camp with a 100Gbit/s uplink!

At the Amsterdam end of that uplink fiber,  we’re connecting our DFZ router at Nikhef, Sciencepark Amsterdam. At this place, we’ll be able to reach several uplink providers that have kindly agreed to sponsor IP transit to SHA2017: NTT (100Gbit/s!), CoreBackbone (100Gbit/s!), SURFnet, NL-ix, and BIT.

Quick stats:

• About 3km of single-mode fibre planned. 5km of UTP sponsored by BIT.
• 48 datenklos* including one on the pier
• 10+ 10GbE/40GbE distribution switches, donated by CumulusNetworks
• 85 gigabit access switches with 10GbE uplinks, loaned by EventInfra
• 125 WiFi accesspoints with 802.11ac/802.11n, loaned by EventInfra & Aruba
• 200+ SFP+ & QSFP transceivers, loaned by Flexoptix
• 220Gbit/s of transit in Nikhef
• Our own AS with 5 peerings
• One /16 and one /20 IPv4 space (69,632 addresses) and one /48 IPv6 block, good for 402,975,273,204,876,391,568 (or 402 quintillion) addresses
• 2 datacentres
• 1 cloud, 1337 cybers.

No network without fibre

Even though Scouting Landgoed already has loads of fibre buried in its campgrounds, there is still a lot of fibre needed to get uplink to all of the datenklos. With the combined effort of C3NOC, EMFNOC and SHA2017/OHM2013-NOC there are plenty of multi-core single-mode fibre cables available. These cables are all terminated (spliced) by volunteers over the past 4 years.

For SHA2017, more splice-work is scheduled. New cables and repairs are to be made. If you want to help out or want to learn how to splice fibre, please join our fibre splice party at July 8th at Hack42, Arnhem. Please indicate your attendance on the wiki. Especially if you have (access to) splicing equipment.

Topology

Excerpt of the network-topology

Team:NOC is planning for a robust network-topology using lots of switches with routing-capabilities.  Each datenklo is routing its local subnets and will have two 10GbE uplinks, one uplink to either datacentre A or B and one uplink to another datenklo. There will be plenty of gigabit copper ports to go around. If your village needs more, drop an e-mail to noc-requests@sha2017.org.

Every datenklo-switch is running some form Linux (like CumulusLinux), making automation & monitoring easier.

NOC helpdesk

To answer all your questions and debug all of your issues, NOC helpdesk will present in the Info-tent.
Team:NOC currently seeks a coordinator for the NOC helpdesk; if you are up the for the challenge, please drop an email to noc@sha2017.org.

Co-location

To use "moar bandwidth"; Team:NOC would like to host a co-location facility like at previous events. However, co-location is currently lacking a coordinator. If you want to invest the time and effort to make this happen, please get in touch! 

Wiki

For more info about the network at SHA2017 see: https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Network 

*) For those who are not familiar with Datenklos: they’re portaloos housing a network switch, and are used to connect users on the fields to the network using UTP cables.