You may freely reprint this in its entirety for the furtherance of SF,
fantasy and horror conventions.
All other rights reserved © 1999-2001, John
Edw. Bartley, III
Internet Cafes are becoming an increasingly popular service at SF conventions.
This brief is intended to outline experiences in planning, assembling
and operating them.
B. Some other folks get positively itchy if they’re not on the Net daily, or more often. They desperately want an I-Cafe, especially if they don’t have a laptop.
C. Laptop-owning con members often still prefer using the I-Cafe.
Why?
1. Hotel phone systems often are very slow for internet
connection
2. Often they don’t have a connection at all for laptop
modems
3. Digital hotel phone systems can fry analog modems and
laptops
4. Laptop users don’t like to bring bulky printers
5. Net users like to be social as they ‘surf’
6. Sometimes you can offer them a faster connection (see
Provisioning, below).
7. Who wants to tote around an extra 2-5 kilos of fragile
and easily stolen geekage?
D. Panel members like/need to do research. Of course, they never need to do it at the last minute, because their sole and exclusive raison d’etre for the months preceding the con has been to be fully prepared, they’ve spend weeks communicating with the other panel members in advance so they’ve scripted exactly what their presentations will be; and none of them have any other responsibilities. Right.
E. Con staff need to print signs reflecting change, need to write Daily ‘Zines and other bulletins, and need to communicate. Since you’ve got the PCs (and hopefully a printer), you can make the Cafe more useful (and its budget easier to justify) by assisting other departments with their computing needs.
I-Cafes absorb function space, so you compete with Programming and other services for the use of oft-scarce space and resources as well as funds. Programming has been doing this for years; you have not, so a head-to-head battle is like sending Bob from Accounts into the Combat Test Range to meet the Troll. Instead, be nice if you want to have an I-Cafe.
You will need to plan the acquisition and preparation of many elements. Here’s a skeleton list:
A. PCs running Windows (‘95 is adequate for most needs).
B. A Mac or two, or maybe some Linux boxes.
C. Volunteers who understand both systems to assemble and configure the systems.
D. Vols who kinda understand how to use both kinds of desktops to assist users and oversee ops.
E. A printer (lasers preferred; color printing is too tempting to allow unrestrained access).
F. The feed to your Internet Service Provider of choice (see Provisioning), and
G. A local area network to connect them all together. Peer-to-peer is fine, 10Base-T is fine, nothing more deluxe is needed, as your feed from the ISP will be the slowest element you have and spending more won’t speed up its bottleneck any. You may wish to add Wi-Fi (AKA 802.11b) into a lobby or bar area so you can offer folks with Wi-Fi-equipped laptops or handhelds their access, without having them congest your I-Cafe.
H. DOS systems? Don’t laugh; DOS web browsers are competent and fast on old/slow/donated PCs, and work just fine over LANs. Look at http://www.arachne.cz and http://www.comatose.freeserve.co.uk/Arachne.htm among others.
I: Software: Make Santa’s List now of web browsers, news readers, mail and Telnet programs, ZIP/archival utilities, multimedia plugins, freeware office applications, ad nauseam. Don’t collect them now, as they will all be in different release versions by Con time.
J: If your feed goes out a window, how will you secure that window against thieves? 1x4s for braces and duct tape to hold the 1x4s in place worked with Doubletree’s sliding glass doors.....
K: Miscellany: LAN cabling, power cables, surge protectors, toner/ink/ribbons for the printer, paper, diskettes to give to members who need a copy of this-or-that, scratch pads, Post-It Notes(TM), pads of note paper, pencils/pens, whiteboard markers, nooses of the finest hemp. Duct tape. More duct tape.
L: Maybe a CD-RW drive and a spindle or two of future coasters, if your con is filthy rich.
Studying earlier year’s con budgets will help you understand what’s practical; you can also find a friendly SMOF somewhere and ask them how best to pitch it. Look for one who’s a technomage, they’re more understanding of the technicalities which will drive your budget request.
Once you have a green light, then start collecting your core volunteers. You will want two other senior vols who are sysadmins or other computing professionals and who can be trusted to know a hawk from an handsaw. You will find many other vols as you approach the con, but you’ve got to have a core of other technomages to cover the con’s obligation to deliver on your promises, should you get hit by a beer wagon or go on TDY to Johnston Island (both of which have happened to yours truly unexpectedly).
Six PCs, a Linux box and a Mac were very heavily used at Orycon in 2000, with 1,600 badged members. Six PCs and a Mac were adequate for the same number of fen at Orycon in 1999. Three PCs in 1998 were screamingly inadequate for the same membership size.
Here’s our 2000 budget:
$ 100 Internet via MMDS (Multichannel Multipoint (hybrid
media) Data Service)
$ 975 Four 450mHz PCs and a G3-350mHz Power Mac with one
monitor, delivered
$ 95 Another monitor to rent
$ 40 Duct tape, timber, cables, adapters
$ 125 Hotel surcharge for 24/7 use of their phone line
-------
$1,335
What this budget does NOT show is use of:
$ 700 Microwave receiver/router for the MMDS purchased the previous
year
$ 80 Donated POTS modem (outbound leg of the data
stream for the hybrid MMDS)
$ ??? Six donated 15" SuperVGA monitors
$ ??? Two donated PCs
$ ??? Donated LAN cables, surge protectors, A/C extension cables,
pens/pencils/paper
$ ??? The value of a 6x12m room which could have been used for
other programming
A. Rental. The most popular solution.
1. Generate a list of your desired hardware.
2. Months in advance, sift the Yellow Pages: Computer
Rental.
3. Select only firms with display ads (firms are really
committed if they spend that much).
4. Fax/email them your wish list. Be prepared to
scale it back.
5. Collect after-hours contact numbers for rental agencies.
Don’t pick one without...
B. Loaned from con members (i.e., you and your technomages). Popular,
but....
1. Will your con indemnify members against loss of equipment
by theft or accident?
2. However, old hand-me-down PCs will run DOS browsers
speedily. Seriously.
C. Loaned/donated by tech firms. Works well in Silicon Valley,
perhaps less well elsewhere.
1. Contact the PR department of manufacturers and ISPs.
2. Find guidelines for donations and promotions and who
the decision makers are.
3. Send them by snail mail your wish list, fine tuned
to what they make/sell, with a cover letter on Con stationary. (Often decision
makers are pointy-haired managers who can barely work an Etch-A-Sketch.
Really. Make it look impressively businesslike.) In the U.S., if you are,
or are sponsored by, a 501(c)(3) IRS-registered non-profit, say so in the
letter. This works especially well should you have a manufacturer’s plant
in your area, but even national firms sometimes want to market to ‘1,600
generally affluent convention members predisposed to spend money on high-tech
products’ (similar lines can help if placed in that well-written letter).
D. Outright purchase by the con. Only if you must.
1. Do you want to invest in equipment guaranteed to be
obsolete in 3 years? (No).
2. Where will you keep it between cons? (Dry, not where
it gets stolen).
3. Don’t plan on allowing members to use equipment between
cons. That’s called conversion of assets and can jeopardize any
non-profit status your con or its parent organization may have. IRS can
be very stuffy about this.
A. It just is not practical to expect a POTS (“56K”, but it never is) line to support more than two PCs in 1999. Soon the expansion of T-1s (and faster) in the office world and DSL/cable modems at home will make a connection via v.90 POTS modem laughable for even one PC. Therefore, get to know the high speed connectivity options available at your con hotel.
B. The worst case option is to walk up to the hotel and say, “I’d like a T-1, please; how much will that cost me?” The hotel looks at any service that’s out of the ordinary as an opportunity to mark it up for extra profit, and the price will blow your budget out of the water.
Instead, directly contact any non-phone-company provider of high speed connection to the internet and get their pricing. Phone companies (the ‘LEC’, or Local Exchange Carrier; you know, the Baby Bell in your area you get ordinary phones from) will require you work through the hotel, or call the hotel immediately after you hang up, so do NOT contact the LEC.
Some alternative phone companies (industry buzzword: ‘CLEC’, or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) can offer better pricing on T-1s, partial T-1s, DSL and/or ISDN, but only if you contact them first and work out the details.
Sometimes the hotel already has excess capacity and will sell it cheap; find, but get a CIR (Committed Information Rate) in your contract, else you can find that the ‘high speed data line’ sold to you at D-300 is a small slice of a very overloaded pie and your data feed is very, very inadequate.
C. ISDN BRI is lame; it’s expensive, complex to set up (and easy for the LEC to screw up) and only provides 128kbps per line. If that is all that is available, well, take it... but there are better alternatives.
D. If you have a cable modem internet service or DSL service in the hotel’s vicinity, that’s excellent; but you MUST expect the hotel will want A Piece Of the Action for connecting your room to any other outside service. The hotel may not be connected for DSL use now; it certainly is not connected to the local cable system, as hotels learned long ago they can do cable cheaper than a cable company can. Find out what your choices and costs are early, budget for it and don’t complain to the hotel (unless your hotel contract gives you leverage here {rare}).
E. Orycon is lucky enough to have an MMDS carrier (see Appendix B) in line-of-sight to our hotel. Wantweb.net provides a high speed download (768kbps in 1998, 1.544 mbps in 1999 and 2000) through a small 2.5 gHz microwave antenna stuck on a small pole and wired to the side of the hotel just outside the I-Cafe room. We use a POTS line for the upstream, but given the typical use of an I-CAFE, very little goes upstream except for email and the URLs of websites requested, so an asymmetrical service works well. Teligent.com and Clipper.net also provide such services, and AT&T Digital (a separate corporation from AT&T Cable) is testing Project Angel, a very similar device.
F. How much bandwidth do you need? Well, 1.544 mbps of downwards bandwidth was just about right to serve eight PCs at Orycon in 1999. (BTW: We also used provided a PC to our Office that year for email. If you can find other departments who need a slice of your Internet feed, go for it, as that makes your budget request more important.)
G. If nothing else is available, you can get a satellite Internet feed; installation and equipment purchase approaches $1,000. The dish must be pointed at the southern sky to work, which limits the rooms available to you. See Appendix A for Starband details.
H. If you are really blocked, but have line-of-sight to somewhere which does have signal, you can add directional antennas to off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware (AKA 802.11b). Read how Robert X. Cringley did it (and more details here).
0. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
1. The Internet Cafe is open only to members of this convention in
good standing.
2. Use of the facilities is at your own risk.
3. Members must be courteous to others, both volunteers and other patrons.
4. Members will limit use to 20 minutes per session when others are
waiting.
5. Adults will not access material restricted to adults with sensitive
or controversial content when minors are present.
6. The convention and its sponsoring organizations are in no way liable
for what happens with your account if you do not delete your username,
password, cookies or any other personal data from the system you use.
7. We require you to delete your username, password, cookies and all
other personal data each and every time you use our system.
8. The Internet Cafe is governed by the same rules as the rest of the
convention, and you will adhere to them at all times.
9. Food and drink may be limited to safety zones within the Internet
Cafe in order to protect sensitive and expensive equipment.
10. If problems occur, speak to a volunteer on duty, and gently, politely
ask for help.
11. The laws of the state and the nation will be observed and, if need
be, enforced, as will convention rules and hotel requirements.
12. Volunteers on duty do have the responsibility to ask persons to
remove themselves from the Internet Cafe if problems arise, and will make
referrals to the convention committee as appropriate.
13. Violations of the above will be referred to the convention committee
for action, including, but not limited to, revocation of membership.
14. If you have any questions in the Internet Cafe, please don’t be
shy about asking for help from the I-Cafe volunteers.
B. Have a list of all the standard software for machines, including
but not limited to:
Web browsers (IE, Netscape, Opera, AOL)
Mail clients (Eudora, PINE)
News readers (Free Agent, Xnews)
Telnet clients; lots of users connect to their ISP/office by
Telnet, a surprising number
ZIP/archive utilities (EnZip, WinZip)
Multimedia plug-ins (Shockwave, QuickTime)
Your own special scripts (such as a cookie eraser)
GHOST or Drive Image (to restore atampered-with PC to its original
configuration)
C. Develop a timeline, showing every critical deadline and waypoint in the process, from start to end. Here’s a hypothetical example, counted in days before the con:
D-300 Select ISP, determine telecom costs, survey rental firms, submit
budget to Con Chair.
D-270 What hotel room will you have? Will it work for the feed? When’s
hotel move-out?
D-240 Publish hours and brief description of services offered in first
Progress Report.
D-210 Select two other technomages. Rewrite timeline & equipment
list. Start software list.
D-180 Contract w/ telecom firm for service. Check again with
rental companies for rates.
D-150 Confirm with ISP and telecom provider, hotel liaison for provisioning
the telecom line.
D-120 Put call in Progress Report for second-tier vols. Check details
again with hotel liaison.
D-90 Contract with rental firm (Waiting gets you better PCs; hardware
goes up, prices drop).
D-60 Write operations schedule; who does what when. Also write AUP,
circulate for comment.
D-30 Recheck everything about the telecom service, the hotel and the
rental equipment.
D-20 Assemble master discs to load software, reconfirm volunteer schedule.
D-10 Recheck everything again. Load any PCS now on hand w/ software.
Test all cables.
D-3 Oh, yeah, when do we have to be out of the hotel room? Any last
minute hotel changes?
D-2 Move into I-Cafe, set up PCS and LAN. Receive and check rental
equipment.
D-1 Telecom provisions your internet feed. Test w/ multiple downloads.
Train vols.
After the con:
Secure rental equipment for pickup by rental company.
Pack your own hardware so you can find everything again easily next
year.
Secure loaned-by-members’ equipment.
Clean the room out by time specified by hotel.
Throw your vols a party of their own, they’ve earned it.
Write the post-mortem report based on what you heard at the party and
at Onions & Orchids.
However, technomages are not needed at all times. Once shakedown completes and systems run reliably, all you need are confident Internet users with patience. Can’t stress enough the need for patience, as (believe it or not) not all con members are power users, and some will need help.
I suggest you schedule a technomage to check in the I-Cafe hourly, and leave the immediate overwatch to second-tier volunteers who are merely competent web surfers. Also, get a pager or a shoe phone and make sure that number’s posted so you can be found in the event of a major failure or a scheduling disconnect.
Help is most often requested for members who want to pick up email remotely from their home ISP. Make sure your second-tier vols can walk through setting up a new account at yahoo.com, email.com, canada.com, hotmail.com, et cetera, and configure it to pick up email from a POP3 and IMAP server at an ISP.
Internet novices also need help often in searching; showing them dogpile.com, mamma.com and google.com (or your modern equivalents) and making sure they can show users how to web search will make the I-Cafe experience more pleasant for your members.
Second-tier vols must understand what your system can and cannot do; how to print, what’s needed to reestablish the internet feed if there’s a power failure, and how to ration system use.
Schedule training, perhaps the night before the con opens, for those
second-tier volunteers. Vols hate nothing more than being stuck in
the trenches without knowing exactly what to do, and without a training
guide or ops manual to refer to. Unhappy vols will tick off members
and/or walk, leaving you with greater problems.
If at all possible, coordinate with Child Care and arrange for separate
space, or if not possible, reserve time for kid-surfing, or perhaps reserve
a bank of machines on one side of the room for them. Always carefully
watch the interaction of adults with kids in the I-Cafe.
B. Chat rooms, MUDs and MOOs. Users who use these services can absorb hours on line. Set your policy and stick by it.
C. Rotation. How long can a user use while others are waiting?
We set a 20 minute policy, and when new folks arrive, say to the user who’d
been there over 20 mins and had been there the longest, something like
these, in sequential order (normally, only the first was required):
“There are new folks queuing up; will you be much longer?”
“You’ve been here xx minutes, and others would like to use the
system as well.”
“Please complete your session in two minutes.”
“It’s time, now.”
Next year, I’ll put vinyl plastic on the monitors and use a dry erase marker to record the time folks arrived (like ‘15' for 15 minutes after the hour); in 1999 and 2000, we used Post-It Notes, and went through a lot of pads.
D. Volunteers who graft themselves to a PC. Some folks volunteer because, well, the Internet is their life. Pry them loose from a machine ruthlessly when members come it to use the I-Cafe, as vols should have no special perks.
E. Cookies. Suggest you set your browsers to ‘accept only cookies to send back to the originating server’ and disable ‘Warn me before accepting a cookie’. Then, write a script ('batch file') & put it on the desktop which overwrites the Netscape cookies file with a nicely blanked cookie file as it purges the Netscape cache, and deletes all IE cookies. Change the browser’s shortcuts so they execute a batch file, with the cookie blanker script called before the browser runs. This will weed the gubbage out of your PCs somewhat.
A batch file can execute multiple commands in sequence under Windows
if the /x parameter is used, e.g.:
Netscape_cookie_blanking command_line /x
IE_cookie_blanking_command_line /x
cache_purge_command_line /x
launch_the_browser_command /x
F. Laptop users are the greatest pain, as they need special handholding
to reconfigure their laptops, then use your connect to suck giant files.
Laptops crashed connections twice in 1999, and finally were 86'd because
of all the problems generated. Sorry, but we can only do so much
at a volunteer event......
John Bartley, PC sysadmin w/ 22 yr. in this silly racket (what else
would I do; sell Buicks?)
http://www.503bartley.com
johnbartley3@yahoo.com
tel. 503-BAR-TLEY
Appendix A: Starband's official FAQ, StarbandUsers.Com, alt.satellite.starband and the PC Magazine review.
Appendix B: Terrestrial microwave internet service described in WIRED 7.12, at Tech TV, and in Network Magazine