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Great story about DC18 from National Geographic!

[story]

Thank you EVERYONE who made Def Con 18 so successful - which is every one of you! Speakers, staff, press, contest & event organizers, and just as importantly the attendees! This was the best con I've personally had in years!

I'm still unpacking a little, but wanted to get the NOC Team's closing slides up (I added a few more stats that effffn had sent over to me) so you now have the complete set. They are posted here [PDF, 3MB].

We'd be VERY interested in any feedback you have on the DefCon Mobile Edition web-app we wrote this year. Compliments or complaints-- please, let us know if it was even worth doing, what we could do better, etc. We want to wrangle together app writers (inside & outside of staff) so we can make all the DefCon apps better for you. So give us your feedback! (noc -at- defconnetworking d0t org)

We've already started planning discussions for the DC19 Network at the Rio! See you all there!

Good MORNING! Yes, Sunday Morning... which most people sleep through due to the events of Saturday night. Here at DefConNetworking, we understand. Ugh, we understand!

But last night was awesome - the Ninja's threw a blow-out party - it was awesome! Many thanks to Barkode & all the Ninja Networks guys for taking care of people. I was really pleased to see a number of DefCon newbies at the party, too. They were having a blast, and I would say it was a huge success.

But back to the network - things have been humming away. We've heard some people still having a hard time keeping stable wifi connections - we'll keep working on that. It's an issue that some devices/OS's have, having a hard time deciding which AP to connect to, because they were so many around. We understand it's frustrating and we'll see if we can work on that for next year. It's a balance between coverage and capacity (clients/AP).

Meanwhile, we've peaked bandwidth at 60Mb yesterday morning (5-min average), and even hit 54Mb this morning! Perhaps people are grabbing all the torrents they can while they can?

We're glad to see a higher simultaneous client attach rate this year - up almost 40% over last year. We'll gather more facts/stats for the closing ceremonies and post those afterwards.

Enjoy your Sunday!

Here's your Saturday morning update... wait, it's Saturday already?!

Wireless is working well again - we think we have a hold on the rebooting AP's. We are curious if the ninja badges are interfering with wifi (or is our wifi interferring with the badges? The badges have the ninjas; does that make DefCon's wifi the pirates?! FIGHT!)

Wired network (speakers, press, staff) - 5x5. Someone asked for a 30'ft cross-over cable today. Welcome to DefCon.

Our ISP (Sparkplug) called us last night -- "Oh hey, we went ahead & opened your line up to 100Mb - use it!" - so please, for the sake of the children, use the net! :) (kick-ass of them to do that, btw!!)

Somehow some of us got some sleep last night - not sure how we did that, but there it is.

We've seen that, roughly, 50% of the wifi users are on secure wifi. We'd be curious for any feedback on how things are going out there - email us (noc at defconnetworking dot org, or @TheLockheed on Twitter).

The irony is that in the DefCon NOC - we have low wifi coverage.

Enjoy your Saturday! Get out, see the talks, make some friends, talk to people. DefCon is an amazing experience, get the most out of it that you can!! Here's a quote from a DefCon Virgin this year, "This really is the best experience I've had in my life. And I'm being very literal. Thank you for your help and support."

Have some bandwidth & users graphs...

Can you tell where we re-booted the wireless network? :)

The wifi access points are randomly rebooting (cycling about every 15 mins). We're working on fixing it now.

We found a fix for all you iPhone/iPad users. It's a known issue with Apple devices, apparently.

The work-around is here.

Thank you Princeton IT Group for the help!