workshop-support-team
BSides Workshop Support Team
Given the increasing levels of complexity involved in delivering relevant and powerful workshop experiences at conference, this team provides an extra layer of support to workshop leaders and workshop infrastructure to prevent circumstances that leave students unable to participate because of network, wifi, system, and/or server capacity failures.
As each workshop uses different (and sometimes new) configurations, including mixtures of local and cloud servers and networking, and as workshop leaders often have their hands full just preparing these simulators, VMs, and complex playfields, one of the first functions the support team can provide is analysis and load testing of the configuration to determine capacity bottlenecks and failure points.
Group projects that could solve bottleneck issues might include:
- automated notification system that emails and texts students at effective intervals reminding them to download files and prep their machines for the workshop;
- portable high-capacity stand-alone wifi fileservers, for quick downloading of VMs and large files for 20-30 students;
- Ethernet-based portable fileserver with hub, cables, easy one-plug power (and service to pre-load files);
- Ethernet room-wiring (routers, cables and hubs for each table, etc.);
- scripts that check student machines for common problems that will kill a student's participation, such as a company group policy that prevents the running of unknown VM's or needed tools;
- a pool of 20-30 USB sticks that we can pre-load with the workshop file set;
- back-up, mirrored, or extended server capacity in the cloud, ready to go (half the students run on local server, half run on cloud);
- extra servers that can be used by workshop leaders;
- your idea here!
As each workshop is different, we'd expect to need/use maybe one of these solutions for any one workshop, depending on what our capacity-bottleneck testing and analysis revealed.