Welp, another year, another DEF CON come and gone.

On the whole, it was a big success for the DEF CON NOC. We tried out a few new things that went well. The biggest one was some wireless bridges. For reasons, we had a shortened on site setup time, so we really had to cut down our install time. Mostly this meant cutting down on the number of floor wired drops that we could provide or providing them in a much fast way. We opted for the second option by providing some wireless bridges. We’ll put up a post later with the specifics of these, but all in all, we think they did the job.

We of course ran into a few hiccups, some self inflicted. As usual, the bandwidth crunch was a thing on the first day. Apparently, DEF CON is the time for everyone to download all of the patches when arriving onsite, because, well, reasons. Luckily, bossman DT paid for the bandwidth upgrade, doubling our overall commit from 500Mbps to 1Gbps. On the whole, we feel it worked out over the rest of the weekend. We’re gonna start there next time.

Sometimes, you forget the little things, like making sure you have enough log retention to be able to count number of devices and what not, and then you forget the little things like test after configurations and updates. And sometimes, you then have to have appointments that just don’t work well with making changes. Sometimes. Well, completely unrelated, Saturday there was a DHCP outage. It was a quick fix, but still took a bit to respond because, well sometimes.

Lastly, the third system wide thing was running out of source states on the firewall. No matter how much you test blasting the thing, there’s always the scenarios you hit when going into production. Again, luckily, it was a quick fix, but still lessoned learned.

Now, to the numbers. To give you an insight into what we did, here’s some of the normal usage and build out stats:

Item DC33 DC32 change
Days onsite to setup 2 4 -50%
Interwebz Pipe 1Gbps 500Mbps +100%
Total Bytes Transfered 13.9TB 7.2TB +90%
Unique Mac Addresses 12K 8K +50%
Concurrent Wireless Users 3400 2700 +26%
Floor Drops 111 100 +11%
FreeBSD Firewalls 2 2 -
Core Switches 1 1 -
Edge Switches 16 32 -50% (see wireless bridges)
Access Points 700 650 Added space in the North Hall
Wireless Bridges 62 0 NEW this year
Servers 7 3 +133% moved stuff to VMs so expanded out

If you give the bandwidth, people will come. We’re looking at making sure to keep or increase that in the budget for next year. But, just uh, try to patch before getting here. We do what we can, but still recommend against unpatched systems out there.

Expect a follow up on the wireless stats. We’re getting more and more data out of those, just to see what people are playing with.

Until then, thanks for using the network. And thanks for being understanding when there are issues. We know how critical it is to your experience here, and aim to provide the best we can with what we got. It’s always a balance, but it’s good to see the overall numbers increasing every year, and expect to see more and more good things in the future.

Have fun, kids,

– sparky and mac