Eventful morning already from UTOSC 2009. So far today I’ve had a chance to meet Stormy and say hi, and then traipsed off with her and joined a few other friends from UTOS for a meeting with Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon and some of his staff members. They seemed incredibly interested in what UTOS and the rest of the open source community is doing to encourage collaboration, open learning, job growth, and better ROI for businesses. What a treat! We bounced important points about open source around the circle of enthusiasts and proponents, and fielded questions from the Mayor and his staff with aplomb.
Yesterday we had intermittent problems with the networks. Not unexpectedly for an open source conference, the Cisco wireless APs used here at the SLCC Miller Free Enterprise Center couldn’t quite keep up with demand in some areas of the building, since they’re only rated for a certain number of connections. To add to the fun, apparently they also see foreign SSIDs as unwanted visitors, and promptly stage an active DDOS against the interloper, thus flooding the wifi network so people can’t authenticate successfully. We discovered yesterday that this effect is not only caused by people with their own wifi network shares, but also by the mesh networking features of OLPC XOs. Meaning that a properly equipped six-year-old can effectively take down the network here.
Both the SLCC and UTOS staffs worked together to diagnose and remedy the problem, and today they have put up extra APs to handle the increased traffic. Which is good, because attendance is expected to grow daily through Saturday! (Shout out to Trevor, for the early morning he put into helping with the networking. You’re a trooper, my friend.)
Thank you for the honorable mention Paul