Computing Facilities for Conferences

A Guide for Computing Staff

When we get wind of a conference being hosted by Informatics, CEG appoints a CO to be the computing contact for the conference organisers. This will normally be the site liaison for one of the affected sites. If you have been appointed the computing contact for a conference, this page is for you.

Contents

1. School Policy that you should know and work to
2. General Points about coordinating computing for a conference
3. Facilities that may be asked for, and how to provide them
4. Timetable - a countdown to the conference
5. Comments and Corrections

Policy

School Policy

What you do is governed by the School's agreed Policy On Computing Support For Conferences. Make sure that the conference organiser is also aware of it.

You should stick to the policy most rigidly for those larger conferences which charge attendance fees and which are probably organised by an independent (of us) organisation of some kind; expenses for these conferences can be claimed back from the organisation, so the conferences will be able to give as much of the work as possible to hired help (e.g. postgrad students), taking it off our backs so we can get on with our other work.

For smaller more in-house meetings with limited resources, feel free to make more of an effort to help out where it seems appropriate.

CEG Policy

CEG needs to know roughly how much work will be involved in catering for this conference's computing needs. With this in mind, one of the first things you should do for your conference - after having read this guide and absorbed the details - is to talk to the conference organiser, and with them draw up a detailed list of the conference's computing needs, which of them you (the CO and CSO team) are handling, and as exactly as you can at this stage say what you're going to do to satisfy each need.

Once you have such an agreed list of needs and actions, send it to CEG. If you don't hear anything back you can assume that they approve of you doing all this work.

Please remember that they must have the list to give them the opportunity to check your conference workload and have a rethink of necessary (for instance, if the conference threatens to take time away from other important work you're doing).

General Points

• Your job is to be a single point of contact on all Informatics computing matters for the conference organisers. This should save the organisers chasing about between user support people and various COs whenever they want to ask for a particular computing facility for the conference. You're not expected to do all the work yourself - just act as a point of contact, farm out requests appropriately, and coordinate everything and make sure it all gets done on time and to the right specs.
• Delegating is encouraged - you are expected to coordinate the work, not do it all personally.
• Work for conferences should be done by the COs and CSOs only if it can't easily be done by other people. For example, setting up a Windows PC or writing a web page could perhaps be done by a postgrad student, whereas liaising with EUCS on networking arrangements or setting up special environments are things which the computing staff would be best placed to do. Agree this with the conference organiser before doing anything else.
• We're happy to lend conference organisers bits of kit as needed, if we have them available.
• Read the EUCS's page on Computing & IT For Conferences. This will tell you a lot of what you need to know.
• If any University computer or network is to be used, each delegate must be aware of, and must agree to (and sign), the University Computing Regulations. Ask the conference organiser to arrange this (perhaps it can be done at registration). The regulations are revised from time to time, and irritatingly the URL can change. The URL at the time of writing was http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/EUCS/regs.2004.html but check that this is the most recent version by looking in the EUCS A-Z index.
• Edinburgh First is the University body that deals with conferences happening at the University. The conference organiser should register with them and book rooms through them. (The computing contact shouldn't have to have anything to do with this but it's mentioned here in case it helps to know about it.)
• This again is not your concern, but is mentioned in case it comes in handy: MALTS handles the University's audio-visual facilities, for example in lecture theatres - although their equipment page says that organisers of larger conferences have to use Edinburgh First as a go-between rather than dealing directly with MALTS.
• If the conference needs access to a room behind a swipe-card lock (for example to use computing facilities in a student lab), special access arrangements will need to be made. One way to do it would be to arrange for the swipe-card doors to be unlocked during the conference. Ask David Hamilton to arrange this. The conference organiser will be responsible for security if doors are unlocked for the conference. Make sure that the organiser is aware of this and agrees to take responsibility. For security the conference organiser should arrange to hire a postgrad student helper to be on duty in the lab to help delegates and watch for computer thieves. Alternatively for smaller-scale events a conference helper could simply let people through the doors using his or her own card.

  The University Card authorities don't seem to cater for conferences. Visitors to the university can apply for individual personal cards but this will be far too much hassle for conference organisers. Anyway, there's more information about the University Card for door managers and for card users.

• If you get asked Who do I phone if something goes wrong out of hours? :
  1. For Informatics, talk to Alastair about out of hours support. He may then go and talk to the conference organiser.
  2. EUCS says (like us) that it monitors its facilities constantly during the day but that it currently does not offer 24 hour support. For ETAPS 05, EUCS said The first point of contact should be your usual support contact. If you are desperate then you could try your luck with 504933, the Kings Buildings machine room.

Facilities

Find out from the organiser what facilities the conference will need. Here's what's possible:

• Wireless network.
• Wired network.
• "Web Cafe" Facilities.
• Lecture/Presentation facilities.
• Web site.
• Email addresses and lists.
• Email Relays.
• PCs for admin (e.g. for registration desks).

Wireless Network

Delegates need to have individual accounts for the University's wireless network. These accounts do not need to be created specifically for each named delegate; it is enough for conference organisers to count the number of delegates and to ask EUCS for that many wireless guest accounts. The account details should be handed out to delegates at registration time. A note should be kept of which account was handed to which person. Wireless access costs £1 per delegate for the duration of the conference. Delegates must sign the computing regulations before using the wireless network. The EUCS's Computing & IT For Conferences page should tell you who to speak to or which address to mail about asking for access.

What you need to do

• Find out exactly where wireless access will be needed and check it against the list of access points. Don't forget to check our own list of access points too. (There's also a handy set of coverage maps and some EUCS pages on wireless networking.)
• You can test the signal strength by taking a DICE laptop to the area, configuring it for wireless with "sconf -v" and repeatedly typing "/sbin/iwconfig" as you wander about.
• Ask the conference organiser to arrange for delegates' agreement with the computing regulations as discussed above.
• Tell the conference organiser how to order wireless accounts. Wireless accounts for conference delegates need to be requested from the EUCS - mail compit@lists.ed.ac.uk, but check the EUCS's Computing & IT For Conferences page in case the contact address has been changed. Accounts should be ordered at least a week before they'll be needed. At this stage EUCS just needs to know the number of accounts you want, not the names of the users.
• Tell the conference organiser that the charge for wireless will be £1 per delegate for the duration of the conference.
• The EUCS has documented the Steps For Getting Started on the University wireless network. Pass the URL (http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/nsd/access/wstartup.html) on to the conference organiser.
• By default, the University web pages in ed.ac.uk are not available to conference delegates using the wireless network, for security reasons. However EUCS may well be willing to waive this restriction for you if you ask them nicely, for instance if you are able to point out to them that the conference's own web site is in ed.ac.uk, or that the EUCS's instructions for using the wireless network are also in ed.ac.uk.
• When a batch of wireless accounts are made, whoever receives them should take note of the name of the person who provided the accounts, and find out their phone number. If your conference runs out of wireless accounts, EUCS can make more at very short notice, but it helps to know who to phone! (For ETAPS 05, Alan Reid on 504932 had made our first batch of accounts, and he was very helpful when we asked him to drop everything and make 200 more accounts, cheerfully making them for us in less than half an hour.)
• If your conference is a big one with hundreds of delegates, try to identify the areas where use of wireless may peak. For instance, is there a space with plenty of seating just outside the main lecture theatre? If you can identify such a place, contact EUCS and let them know roughly how many people may be in that space during the conference, and ask them if they think the wireless network will cope, and if there's anything they think might be worth doing to upgrade its capacity if necessary. If the conference is to be held on Informatics home territory then of course contact our own network team instead. If you do contact EUCS about the wireless before the conference, remember who replied, because you may well want to contact them again during the conference. For ETAPS 05, Bill Byers and George Howat were very helpful, monitoring and making a number of improvements to the wireless service in the AT concourse during the conference, including upgrading the access point and adding a second access point.

Wired Network

Delegates may need network ports for their laptops. We have a conference subnet for this purpose. The general idea is to find a room with some desktop space and some free Informatics network ports (and power points), configure the ports to the conference subnet, and provide some TP cables and multi-way power adapters. Some conference sessions may also need network facilities.

The conference subnet is wire R at all sites except BP, where it's called Conf199. Bugzilla 1109 tracked the creation of the conference subnet for the ETAPS 05 conference.

The subnet is configured to allow the following traffic to pass, and to drop all other traffic: NTP, DNS, ftp, http & https, Kerberos, ssh, telnet & telnets, imap & imaps, pop & pops, SMTP & SMTPS, NNTP, OpenVPN, ICMP.

All this is configurable; contact the network team if you need any changes.

If necessary it can allow unrestricted access to certain IP addresses; this was needed for ETAPS 05 where some delegates needed to use a software licence server in Bologna.

What you need to do

• Ask the conference organiser to arrange for delegates' agreement with the computing regulations as discussed above.
• Ask your conference organiser to poll conference delegates well in advance for any special computing needs, such as unrestricted access to particular IP addresses.
• Let George and the network team know when and at which sites you'll be needing network access for conference delegates.
• Try to find a room at the site with some spare network ports. This can be a "network access" room for laptop users.
  • AT has some ports in 5.01, the tutorial room in the ITO suite - exit the lift and keep going round to the right. The conference organiser can book this room through the ITO. The network ports in 5.01 are numbered 5/189 to 5/212 inclusive and 5/077 to 5/086 inclusive. (Mind you, the wireless coverage in that room is poor.)
  • Student labs in general have very few spare ports, and little spare desk space either.
• Set ports to wire R, the conference net access wire.
• Tell the organiser about the wire's restrictions.
• If there aren't enough spare network ports, ask the technicians for some hubs.
• Ask the technicians to provide some TP cables.
• Make sure that there's enough desktop space for the laptops, and enough chairs for the users.
• Make sure that there are enough electrical sockets. If there aren't, ask the technicians to provide some multi-way adapters.
• Get a list from the conference organiser of all the rooms that the conference will be using, and whether network facilities will be needed in any of these rooms. Check that these network facilities exist! For instance, for ETAPS 05 the JCMB staff coffee room had been booked for an important conference meeting which needed wired network facilities, but there were no network ports in the room. We found this out in time for the technicians to be able to run a temporary cable and hub through from the room next door.
• Remember to sort out card entry as noted above.

"Web Cafe" Facilities

The idea here is that we let conference delegates loose in one of our student labs, so the emphasis is very much on the web rather than on lattes and expressos.

Neil has developed a "conference kiosk" environment for DICE machines. The environment includes a restricted account which only allows the user to run web browsers or ssh or telnet. All files and settings created during the session are held on the local disk and are deleted once the user is finished, safely clearing the way for the next user. Once configured, a DICE machine will automatically login and stay logged in. There are more details on the conference kiosk environment at http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/neilb/kiosk.html.

Conference kiosk mode is not compatible with ordinary logins since it doesn't give you the opportunity to login using your own account. For this reason a lab should be reserved exclusively for conference use. You can do this through the ITO (ito@inf).

What you need to do

• Find out where web cafe facilities will be needed. You basically have a choice of any of our student lab rooms. Another room may be possible if it has Informatics network points and if enough DICE computers can be installed in it, but this would need sorting out with Support well beforehand.
• Talk to Neil about the conference kiosk mode, and ask him to configure a version of it for your conference.
• If you're going to use a student lab, it should be booked through the ITO for exclusive conference use. There should be no mixing of students and conference delegates, their machines are set up differently.
• Just before the conference, get a notice put up at the student lab saying that it is booked for the conference's use.
• Just before the conference, switch each machine in your booked room(s) to conference kiosk mode. To switch a machine to conference kiosk mode add <inf/conf-kiosk.h> to its list of LCFG include files. Once the machine has its new profile it will switch to a login screen which asks you to reboot to enable auto-login (possibly with an error message or two along the way; dismiss this as you see fit). One reboot later the conference kiosk environment will start automatically.
• Remember to sort out card entry as noted above.
• Ask the conference organiser to arrange for delegates' agreement with the computing regulations as discussed above.
• Find out if any printing facilities are needed and if so discuss that with Neil.

Presentation Facilities

This isn't necessarily to do with Informatics computing facilities, but it may well be - for instance the organiser may need DICE machines to be available in lecture venues. The organiser may need a bit of technical help with other computing matters here - for instance getting straight which formats of presentation MALTS computers will accept, and which sorts of data-carrying gizmo will work.

What you need to do

• Ask the conference organiser to arrange for delegates' agreement with the computing regulations as discussed above.
• The organiser may want to get an assistant (e.g. a postgrad student) to get in touch with MALTS to find out what presentation software will be available on the MALTS computers, what formats of file it can accept, and what methods of data transfer will be acceptable (USB sticks, file transfer methods, etc.). They should also ask about data projectors and what sort of connections or hardware standards they need.
• If any network connections are needed for the delegates' own machines in lecture theatres (or for a DICE machine if that's required) read the EUCS Network Service Division's technical note 8.

Web Site

A web server has been set up to host conferences. It's at conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk. URLs are of the form http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/MyConf06/.

What you need to do

• Find out if a web site will be needed.
• Find out which DICE users will need write access to the web site material.
• You can make a web site very simply:
  1. Ask Frontline Support to make a shared area for conference files, for example /group/conferences/myconf06. Ask them to make a special group for it too.
  2. Login to conferences.inf and make a symbolic link pointing to (for example) an "html" subdirectory in the shared area. See the web team's groups and conferences page for details. The web team doesn't mind you doing this bit. Pay attention to the ownership of the symbolic link as described in the groups and conferences page.
• CGI facilities for the conference site are not encouraged, but if the conference organisers insist on having them, contact the web team.
• Tell the conference organisers about the University's secure internet payment facility provided by the Finance Department. It's called the ePayment Gateway (ERA). See ERA information for Schools for more details.
• Find out when any on-line registration or submission deadlines are going to be, and make the web team aware of them. Ask them to keep an eye on the web server as the deadlines approach. Sometimes secure https pages can break while http pages remain OK; watch out for this. (If you see this problem and can't get hold of a web team member, stopping apache then starting it again can sometimes cure this.)

Email Addresses and Lists

What's on offer: mail aliases to point to DICE users; mailing lists for organisers and/or for delegates.

What's not on offer: local mail accounts for delegates. They can however use conference Web Cafe or other internet access facilities to get access to their own web-accessible mail accounts elsewhere on the internet while they're in Edinburgh.

All requests for mail facilities can be given to Frontline Support. If they can't handle a request they'll pass it on to the mail team.

An important point to note is that the names of mail aliases and mailing lists should not clash with possible University UUNs. You can achieve this either by making them longer than eight characters or by putting a hyphen in the middle. For example, myconf06 wouldn't be acceptable, but myconf-06 and myconfer06 would be. If the conference organiser insists on having a name which does clash with a possible UUN, ask Frontline Support to get it registered with EUCS as excluded from the UUN name pool. However if the EUCS has already allocated that UUN, there is nothing we can do and the organiser will have to come up with another alias name.

Email Relay

For delegates who have difficulty sending email by methods other than SMTP, the EUCS may permit the use of the mail relay machine mailrelay.ed.ac.uk. This will forward the messages onwards. Ask confit@lists.ed.ac.uk for details.

PCs for admin

The conference may temporarily need some computers for admin, for example for a conference registration desk. If the organiser wants Windows talk to the Windows team, if DICE talk to Support. John Berry usually has a Windows laptop available to lend out for conferences and other events. A conference student assistant should be able to install any special software or hardware needed on the PC; you shouldn't have to get involved in this.

Timetable

Here's a rough idea of what needs to be done when.

Before Doing Anything Else

• Agree your role with the conference organiser (see General Points above), particularly with regard to School Policy.
• Draw up a detailed list of needs and actions with the organiser. Mail this list to CEG.

(Possibly) More Than A Year In Advance

• Set up the empty web site and hand it over to its maintainers
• Set up mailing lists

Six Months Before

• Describe the possible computing facilities to the organiser and find out what will probably be wanted.
• Warn the conference organiser about the Registration Desk tasks (signing the computing regs and signing for wireless accounts) and about red tape and charges in general.
• Find out whether web cafe facilities will be needed. Pick a suitable room (make sure not just that it's at a suitable site but also that it has enough computers in it) and book it.
• Ditto network ports for laptops.

Three Months Before

• Finalise your choice of (computing) rooms - decide exactly what is going to happen where. Room numbers will probably soon be published in a conference programme to be sent out to all delegates and it'll be difficult to make changes after this.
• Book lab(s) with the ITO, if you haven't already.
• Arrange swipe card door access.
• Ask the conference organiser to ask delegates and speakers to list all special computing requirements, for example network connections for a particular meeting, including any firewall holes that may be needed.
• Find out from the conference organiser in which rooms network facilities will be needed for talks, lectures and meetings. Check out the network facilities here and if necessary make arrangements with the technicians for improvements.
• Check the readiness of the conference subnet and our own wireless APs (where relevant) with our networking team.
• Check the readiness of the EUCS wireless network with EUCS - let them know roughly how many people will be at the conference and where you expect the most wireless use to take place.

One Month Before

• Check the readiness of the conference kiosk environment with Neil.

Two Weeks Before

• Remind the conference organiser that wireless accounts need to be applied for at least a week in advance.
• Ask the technicians to go round the conference rooms and count up the equipment they'll have to provide (hubs, cables, etc.) and ask them to order it if necessary.
• Check/compare final details of swipe card door access.

One Week Before

• Set up an experimental conference kiosk machine and test that it works.
• If relevant, warn EUCS about the forthcoming tidal wave of users about to engulf the wireless network.
• Look for broken machines in your "kiosk" computing lab and get them fixed or replaced (or removed, if you want to create some more space for laptops).
• Check that any loan equipment (e.g. Windows PCs) is lined up ready for loan.
• Ask the technicians to get ready to set up or provide whatever you need from them.

The Day Before

• Set up all "conference kiosk" machines.
• Make sure everything's set up in the labs - machines, cables, hubs, power adapters, etc.

On The First Day

• Check that any computing labs are properly labelled, both for conference delegates ("INTERNET ACCESS") and for students ("RESERVED FOR A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. CONFERENCE").
• Check that everything's as it should be in your computing labs.
• Check swipe card door access.
• Check that any signs and posters in the conference venue give the right room numbers for computing facilities.
• Ask at the registration desk to see if anyone's having computing problems. Tell the conference staff where you can be found. Stay close by.
• If everything's going well, pick up a pack of conference delegate freebies.

During The Conference

• Look out for wireless performance problems and sort them out with EUCS.
• Make sure the conference staff know where to find you.
• You may have to order more wireless accounts at short notice - make sure you know who to get them from - and deliver them to the conference.

Afterwards

• Convert any conf-kiosk machines back to normal: remove conf-kiosk.h then when the machine has its new profile simply logout from the conference account.
• Reclaim any equipment lent to the conference staff.
• Let the technicians know that any equipment they provided (hubs, cables, etc.) can be collected.

Comments and Corrections

Please contact Chris Cooke with comments or corrections to this page.

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