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Part of the Facilities Manager's team, the Network Wrangler is responsible for ensuring that the wired, wireless, and Internet connectivity meets the needs of the convention.

Prior to the convention the Network Wrangler will collect needs send by the convention staff, members and guests and arrange to meet those needs or identify problems with the available network. Examples of these sorts of needs are

1. Where computer networks will be available (I need network connection in the X room)
2. Peer to Peer networking issues (can my room computer control my convention display computer)
3. Types of internet access (will guests be able to use SSH as well as HTTP)

During the convention the he/she will deal with day to day problems as the arise and be the liaison between the hotel's network staff and the convention personnel.

For Penguicon 2012, the team consists of Chris Krieger and the rest of the MPCON Lan staff.

With the move to a new hotel for Penguicon 2012, there were some new challanges, as well as some new advantages. For example, the new hotel has a variable DS3 internet connection, providing up to 48Mbit connection to the internet. Pengucion leased a 20mbit portion of this line for its use this year.

However the Hotel did not have any preconfigured convention floor wireless. Their wireless consisited access points in the guest rooms, and 2 acess points in the lobby supporting up to 25 users each. This simply would not do.

-Network Design With the return of mythlogic and MPCon this year, it was decided to run the majority of the network function off of MPCon owned equipment. Mpcon supplied 3 Cisco 2950 24 port switches, with GBIC uplink ports and another source used a 2 Cisco 3750-x 48 Port gig switches. 2950's were placed in the hotel's 2 IDF's, one at each end of the convention floor, and the 3750-x were deployed in the MDF and the Marquis ball room. Drops were provided by the hotel in the Thomas, Royce, Bugatti, Dearborn, Stutz, Marquis, and registration for the deployment of lan cables and wireless access points.

-Technical Details The network was divided into 2 VLANS Vlan 20 Wired Network 10.9.8.0/22 mpcon.lan

Vlan 21 Wireless Network 172.16.28.0/22 public.pengucion.lan

-Hardware 3x Dell GX 240 Intel P4 1.8ghz Desktops These systems were running Centos 6.2 with a CIS Benchmark level 1 harding standard. The DHCP server ran DHCPD, and the DNS was ran off of BIND 1 DHCP server (with Master DNS) 2 DNS Servers (slaves)

6x Ubiquiti PicoStation M2-HP Wireless access points. These served as the backbone of the wireless network. They were placed at registration, Bugatti, Stutz, Thomas, Royce, and Dearborn.

1 AMDx64 IPcop 1.4.21 firewall This is the same firewall that has ran many MPCon events throughout the years. It configuartion was unchanged for this event, however except it to be running something new next year.

MPCon also provided several game servers for lan gaming, however they were not required to keep the network up and running.