[ietf78-tech] thoughts on the terminal room...

[Rob Nagy]

Sorry been a little swamped....

My $.02 on the Terminal Room

I agree the Terminal Room is no longer relevant for it's original purpose. While a few drafts were printed (I would guess less then 20 for the whole week, it was predominantly used as a meeting room, a place for the 6to4 guys to do presentations/testing, a place for people to do their corporate work and have a lot of conference calls...
Probably <5% of the people were wired and/or ever needed to print. 
In other word most could do everything they wanted to do somewhere else. 
There was a slow but steady stream of people trying to print boarding passes on Friday but I would guess under 30 total. 

So in terms of wired ports and printers, I would say an 8port switch would have sufficed and a printer with a USB cable hanging out of it, and a disk with drivers and directions would have sufficed technically. I think having the technical support person located at a desk by reg from 9-5 makes more sense. That is where they could better assist with all technical issues and open tickets as necessary. We get sucked into bogus problems because we are handy. IMNHO, It shouldn't be any of our job to help help someone  print, except your own corporate IT guy(Assuming the issue is not the printer). But our issues at IETF are often not technical but more political/social.  
In general they don't use it for anything they can't do anywhere else in the venue. Except possibly as a meeting room. But I believe if we change it, or shrink it without putting it to the people the few who are using it for business meetings will scream bloody murder, and the very few who use it as intended will be stuck in the middle of noisy marketing pitches while they try to print drafts. 

So I think we should;
1 Shrink it down to one switch. And provide a smaller space. 
2. Move printing to a common area (near reg maybe), possibly add an attached dumb host for printing, for those who don't have rights to control their devices
4. Move the support person near Reg
5. Shrink the support hours to.                     
      M-Th 9-5, F 9-1pm
6. Well before the meeting, repeatedly announce the intended changes, so no one can say they knew it wouldn't work....


Alice


Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 11, 2010, at 8:02 AM, Geert Jan de Groot <geertj at psg.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:27:10 -0700 Joel Jaeggli wrote:
>> I've been trying to push us to think differently about the the terminal
>> room for a while.
> 
> I hoped for Rob and Sjoerd to chime in, after all, they've spent a lot
> of time at the helpdesk and had a clear view of the people there..
> 
> The number of people connecting to "wire" was surprizing. I spoke to
> a few, and the motivation was wifi problems (which they admitted were
> due to their own brokenness and for which they did not want to trouble
> the helpdesk, thankfully..), or "corporate laptop policies" resulting
> in same. At the same time, I agree that one switch with wires (instead
> of wriring a whole room) would probably do - perhaps one of the
> 8-port or a little bigger. That could be in the hallway, especially
> if it was to be a cheap unmanaged switch.
> Too bad we no longer have the "link event" logs on the switches
> from Maastricht so we can count actual usage. 
> Perhaps something for Beijing (or even, add a cacti graph to count
> terminal room wired network connections..)
> 
> Having the printer "watched" probably made it survive longer,
> an anonymous place in the hallway may be too risky. Not sure if
> the helpdesk minds having it in it's vicinity, given the amount
> of questions on this, this time around. It too, would make wiring simpler.
> Note that the main pain is still power wiring in that room 
> and we're not reducing that by much.
> 
> AfNOG does not have a terminal room, but usually a few places to sit down 
> and chat, and this works well. We always suffer a sudden evaporation 
> of power bars (and so does the hotel, a power strip used to 
> light a desklamp invariably finds that lamp unpowered after a geek session),
> but we don't get many questions on IETF-terminal-room-style setups
> and the questions we do get are not easily covered by 
> a standard terminal room seat (usually power plug adapter / 
> broken power supply / dead hard disk).
> 
> I'd suggest giving it a try, and it's easy enough to undo this
> by moving tables around if neccessary.
> 
> On a similar but different topic, I was able to configure the network
> printer on my XP toy while it was connected to a different subnet,
> which is what caused a few people to contact the helpdesk.
> The processs is a bit counterintuitive ("local printer port" ->
> "TCP/IP network printer port").
> I think this should be verified (on XP and W7), explicitely documented
> (for XP and W7), and a few setup CD's copied for the helpdesk
> once we know what printers we'll have.
> Alternatively, perhaps a samba box can be set up to "beacon"
> the printer service on all relevant subnets if that's what ExPee needs?
> While I apologise to Rob, I'm sure he does not mind a further slowdown
> in helpdesk volume if the printer call load would go down because of this.
> 
> I did miss the boarding pass printer rush - did it happen?
> 
> Geert Jan
> _______________________________________________
> ietf78-tech mailing list
> ietf78-tech at daedelus.com
> http://www.daedelus.com/mailman/listinfo/ietf78-tech