Ma petite parcelle d'Internet...

First of all, the Troppix Linux live distro^[1] I'v been testing intensively and planing to use was not booting on three out of six students laptops. Well, doesn't really matter, I'm a careful guy, so I had a backup distro, the famous Backtrack, so we decided to all move to it. Everything was going fine until we went on traffic injection... We finally had to admit that Madwifi support was at least buggy, at most incomplete, as it was not working at all. Bye bye traffic injection and more specificaly WEP cracking and Wifitap like exercices. OMFG, that really pissed me off. Really.

Anyhow, I finished the dojo, guys were happy with it, but somehow disappointed and I can understand that. However, If I could have foreseen the lack of proper Madwifi support from Backtrack, how could have guess Troppix would not boot after having asked to check hadware against both Whax and Auditor as prerequisite, having successfully booted it on more than ten different PCs and laptops from different vendors and having used it successfully for at least two sessions ?! As Philippe needed a live CD for one of his Windows user student, we figured out his laptop was not even booting nor Troppix, nor Backtrack...

Finally, I decided to track down issues all evening and tuesday, so I could set up a backup practice session this morning. Took some time, lots of downloads and testing, but I was ready in the end. Some students came, others were not available. I should manage to find time to plan another one before the en of the week for them. BTW, it went so fine. We sure got couple of issues with getting people associated with crappy low-end access point, but in the end, we could do the stuff. And people were so happy with it. That's way k3wl.

So here's my conclusions, and thoughts for my next WiFi training. First, WiFi demos and practice is very difficult to achieve. I had the worst difficulities to set working live demos for my talks, so it is for pratice session. Never underestimate Murphy's power ! Second, don't rely on one specific live distros and one backup. Take plenty of them, and in my case, no more Backtrack until Madwifi support is fixed. Here, I could finally got something out of Troppix and Whax. Third, don't rely on easy little prerequisites. Next time, I will ask for stronger ones, typically students will have to come with their laptop running properly a live distro of their choice from a validated list of them, giving a validation procedure so they can check useful features work. Blank CDs are cheap, burning one is fast, testing it take very little time. As I could understand, Trifinite guys at Bluetooth dojo had also issues with live CDs as well. Fourth and last, keep cool when things go wrong, don't loose time on useless debugging. Just concentrate on important thing: teaching. In the end, students were here to learn things, and feedback I had from them was good about that.

Finally, I would like to thank my students for their patience and understanding. I would also like to thank conference organisation for cheerful support, giving me opportunity and means for backup practice session(s). Pacsec/core06 WiFi dojo will be all the more better thanks to you all.