[Cryptech Core] Workshop backup plan kit (was Re: Introductory presentations at Berlin Workshop)

[Leif Johansson]

On 2016-07-05 21:26, Rob Austein wrote:
> At Tue, 5 Jul 2016 18:01:24 +0000, Peter Stuge wrote:
>>> backup plan to serve software packages on LAN in the room if necessary
>> ..
>>> Bad Things can happen to kit while in transit
>>
>> I can easily bring kit to the venue. Let me know what you need?
>>
>> Know that Germany has the worst connectivity in all of Europe.
>>
>> I can maybe get some mobile internet into the room, but indoor
>> coverage is not a given and no contracts include more than a few
>> GB of traffic.
> 
> Back when I ran the technical side of a little company which had a
> booth at every Networld+Interop, planning doctrine said that the demo
> MUST NOT depend on network connectivity outside the booth.  It was
> fine to incorporate the venue network and the Internet in the primary
> plan, but there needed to be a fallback in case networks beyond our
> control were down or unusable.  While our situation in Berlin is not
> identical, it's pretty close: we hope to be able to use the IETF
> network but we can't depend on it, and we have no control over the
> path from the hotel in Berlin to our servers in Reykjavik.
> 
> So primary plan is to use our APT and Homebrew repositories on the
> servers in Reykjavik to supply the packages that users need to
> install, but doctrine says we should have some way of serving that
> content within the demo room if necessary.
> 
> I think that translates to a WiFi hub capable of supporting everybody
> we expect to be in the room, and some kind of box which can run a web
> server.  Not particularly challenging.  If necessary, we take that box
> to someplace where the network does work and wget everything from the
> relevant repositories onto it.  As a last gasp, we have all of the
> source repositories, synthesis and cross compilation tools, etc on
> some box in the room and build and serve our own images in the room.
> 
> I plan to bring a little base station and a little headless Shuttle
> server running Debian Jessie: I will make sure to install Apache on it
> before leaving home, and to mirror the then-current content of
> https://apt.cryptech.is/ and https://brew.cryptech.is/.
> 
> Peter, if you have a WiFi base station which can comfortably serve the
> number of machines we expect to have (no, I don't know what that is,
> ask Leif or Phil), that would be a good thing to bring, as I'm not
> sure that my usual travel base station can cope, I've never used it
> for more than a handful of devices at once.


no more than 35 laptops I think - 5 more than the room physically holds

> 
> Creating a build machine is somewhat tedious.  I've tried to keep
> notes on what needs to be installed but as we've discovered it
> piecemeal I have no doubt forgotten something.  A Debian or Ubuntu VM
> on a sufficiently powerful laptop would probably suffice, doesn't
> necessarily need hardware, I just happen to have some and prefer not
> to tie up my laptop (or bet on VM USB emulation working correctly).
> 
> Having a laptop which can drive the projector would be nice, so that
> nobody has to sacrifice their work machine to the cause during the
> workshop (gets annoying when trying to help a participant means taking
> down the instruction page with all the URLs, Murphy's law says that 30
> seconds after you do that someone will need to know one of those URLs
> again).  If that laptop can also serve as a backup HTTP(S) server, so
> much the better.
> 
> As is no doubt obvious, this is all paranoia.  Then again, this level
> of paranoia saved my company's collective butts more than once, back
> in the day.  With luck we won't need any of the backup kit, but having
> it available gives us more options if something goes pear shaped.
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