Building a NOC from scratch

By the time of Eurofurence29, the event has reached the limit of what typical event venues are able to reasonably provide in terms of network services. Especially the Audio-Video production setup required a network capable of high-bandwith, low-latency, low-jitter, multicast transport in addition to precise time-synchronisation services. For this reason and for the first time ever, an onsite Eurofurence Network Operations Center (EFNOC) has been founded to tackle these increasing demands. During EF29 a fresh team built, for the first time in Eurofurence History, an onsite network capable of meeting these requirements. This network was also depended on for coordination and management of the event (e.g. Security and Registration) and we (the team) set it as a personal team goal to bring a usable WiFi connection to all attendees throughout the event venue. The team was founded as a combination of well known EF staffers supported and completed by furries from the chaos community. We will share details about the network architecture which roughly consisted of a simple VLAN based architecture using Arista DCS-7050TX-72Q switches for 40Gbit/s throughput capabilities in addition to native Precision-Time-Protocol support. We also utilized a hypervisor for network services like DHCP, DNS, monitoring, etc. During the event we encountered many fun issues with our NIC, our switch firmware, our config tooling which we will explain in detail. The talk will also go into details about how we organized the team structure, which skills we observed as critically required, how we dealt with the encountered issues and what we plan to do better next year :)