General-network
Overview
Everything we run at events sits on a single class A subnet (10.0.0.0/8) with significant quirks. Many of these quirks are because the servers, some of the printers and Matt's laptop also need to work when they're at Matt's house. Particularly, some of it was set up many years ago by people who weren't terrifically good at planning this in a sensible fashion, but changing it is way more effort than it's worth.
On site we use several smaller subnets to isolate the WiFi gear in a way that means we can easily find any particular piece of kit by ip address only by knowing its name. This is obviously quite useful when you've just hung an access point in a tent and want to make sure it's working.
Office vs field
The obvious main difference between the office and the field is that there is a connection to the internet.
In the office
- Matt's router lives on 10.0.0.2
- Merple runs DNS and DHCP
- ssh, http, https and openvpn (port 1194) are forwarded to Merple
In the field
- there is no router, some apple and android devices really don't like being unable to reach a router, so we configure dhcp to set the router to merple
- Beaker runs DNS
- Merple runs DHCP
Specific ranges
- 10.0.0.1-10.0.0.100 are excluded from DHCP, this range is allocated to devices with static ips (printers, servers, etc)
- 10.0.0.100-10.0.30.255 is allocated to DHCP clients. We need to keep an eye on this, since creating PD_PUBLIC we get a lot of devices connecting to the network
- 10.2.0.0/24 - this is allocated to the switches
- 10.2.1.0/24 - this is allocated to the access points. PDAP-1 is on 10.2.1.1, PDAP-20 on 10.2.1.20, etc.
- 10.3.1.0/24 - this is allocated to the wireless backbone infrastructure. PDBR-1 is on 10.3.1.1, ect.