Stray Dog #1: WLPC Hype for Prague 2023

In this totally sort of not really impromptu hype session, Jim and John do a little pre-registration chat about the 2023 WLPC-Prague event. Registration opens August 15th, with a number of RUCKUS staff planning to be present...and presenting!

You can check out the event website here for more information on the deep dives and presentations https://www.thewlpc.com/conferences/prague-czech-republic-2023

For more information about the RUCKUS Certified Wi-Fi Associate check out this link https://ruckus-training.s3.amazonaws.com/RCWA/RCWA-study-guide.pdf

Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E
and
https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/

Transcript

John Deegan: I'll let that one go a little bit long for you, Mr. Palmer. How are you, sir? It feels like I just talked to you like yesterday, almost, probably, maybe. 

Jim Palmer: Well, we talk every day, so it's kind of like, 

John Deegan: well, full disclosure and us talking is more like on Slack or Teams, but yeah, we do chat every day, but no, we really actually were on a call yesterday for work and we actually did record two days ago for work and now we're back at it.

We're very productive people. Of course. What else? They add a zero to our paycheck, right? 

Jim Palmer: Yeah. Can I submit that as an expense? 

John Deegan: Zero? Sure. They'll pay that every time. 

Jim Palmer: Oh, I thought we were adding an extra zero. Yeah. 

John Deegan: Well, I guess decimal point. 

Jim Palmer: Oh yeah. We are on the wrong side of the decimal point.

John Deegan: Anyways, it's, it's a Friday. We can officially say it's Friday. I don't care. I'm not going to get bent on the time warp stuff. So, so it's a special episode if you want to call it that. We may or may not post this to everybody, but I know this is going to be shared to a very particular audience because.

There's, there's a European thing coming up in just a couple 

months, 

Jim Palmer: Right? But more importantly, that European thing, the registration opens in like a couple of weeks. 

John Deegan: Indeed it does. So what is this European thing? I mean, I know, you know, Europeans and you know, they drive on the wrong side of the road.

They've got funny looking money. 

Jim Palmer: Not all of them. And quite honestly, let's be honest, their money's better than ours. 

John Deegan: Well, it's better looking. 

Jim Palmer: It's better looking, and it's easy, anyway, and there's, it's not all the countries that drive on the wrong side, just just Nick Nick Turner and, and Peter, Peter McKenzie there in, in the UK.

But anyway, WLPC Prague registration opens on August 15th. 

John Deegan: Ah, see, this is why you're a good co host, because you already had the dates ready. I was just going to say, sometime soon. 

Jim Palmer: I just remembered it was, it's like the 15th. It was like May 15th, June 15th. The July 15th was supposed to when the, the website went live.

But somebody missed it, Matthew, and then it was . It's August. 

John Deegan: We get ourselves in so much trouble for this one. 

Jim Palmer: Oh, we are, but it's Friday. So part of WLPC is, yeah, we've talked about this on the other episode, so I don't want to go too far, but we have boot camps, we have deep dives, and we have presentations.

But the presentations are already set, so it is what it is. What I want to talk about with you today, John, are the other two. 

John Deegan: There's more. 

Jim Palmer: There is more. There is a deep dive. Actually, there's a couple deep dives, and there's one boot camp. Let's start with the boot camp first. 

John Deegan: Sure. 

Jim Palmer: That bootcamp is the RCWA.

And what is that? Cause I forgot. 

John Deegan: RUCKUS Certified Wireless Associate. I believe I should know this. I did teach one, right. 

Jim Palmer: And I'm supposed to teach it in Prague. So if you want to take the RCWA 

John Deegan: And spend a couple of days with Jim. 

Jim Palmer: And spend a couple of days with me. So, all right, so let's, let's, let's take me out because that's now a detriment.

If you want or need the RCWA and you're looking for an in person class, go bug your boss now, because in two weeks you can register to take the class from me. In Prague, WLPC, it's the end of... None of us know the date, I don't know. 

John Deegan: It's right before Halloween. 

Jim Palmer: Right before Halloween, so the week before Halloween.

John Deegan: I'll look, since you got the other ones. You talk, I'll look at the dates. 

Jim Palmer: So... 

John Deegan: See, now we're being smart. 

Jim Palmer: Yeah, so the, so... So, but you have two weeks to get that registered for and get that taken care of with your boss to get approval to come take the RCWA with, with Jim and hopefully might even have a John involved.

But since we wanted to keep this short, did you find the date the date yet? 

John Deegan: So it's Octo, so the, the former, the formal overall conference is October 25th to the 27th, and the pre-conference bootcamps are the 22nd to the 24th of October. 

So 

Jim Palmer: October 22nd, mark it on your calendar. You want to be in Prague at WLPC taking the RCWA bootcamp.

We should make that, instead of bootcamp, we should just call it like BC, so it's like even more initials. 

John Deegan: Sure, if we want to do more alphabets. And I'd be remiss to say this, because I know I was thinking about it before, and we didn't get a chance to give them a shout out yesterday, or two days ago, because the...

It was a very formal podcast with the boss but we know we won't see Gjermund, but Gjermund, if you listen to this, I don't know if we're sharing this or not, but you know, thoughts are with you. Appreciate listening and hope you are kicking cancer's little butt. Anyways, I had to plug that one cause I know he was there last year and I know we won't see him this, this year.

He already said he wasn't going to make it, so. 

Jim Palmer: I'd miss that. That's too bad. 

John Deegan: Yeah. But for good, well, not for good reasons, but I totally, totally respect why he's not going to make it. Under, 

Jim Palmer: Understandable reasons. 

John Deegan: Yeah. Yes, exactly. 

Jim Palmer: In addition to the bootcamp, there's a couple of other things that we want to talk to our listeners about, and that's the deep dives.

John Deegan: Yay! I'm playing with the soundboard today in full honesty because it didn't work out on Wednesday. And I had to like reboot and fix it and beat the crap out of it with a hammer. So anyways, so two deep dives. 

Jim Palmer: Yes. 

John Deegan: Now there's the old standby and I don't want to pick on you by saying old standby, I think, but this is like your 15th straight WLPC teaching your antenna deep dive, I think 15th or 

16th.

Jim Palmer: Well, you had, you added an extra digit on the wrong, on the other side of the decimal point. It's my fifth. 

John Deegan: I'm doing that today. The fifth. Okay. So. So five, five boot camp appearances for Jim. 

Jim Palmer: Deep dives. 

John Deegan: The deep dive, I'm sorry. And this is the second one, second time you're on the Prague registration, right?

Last year was your first year in Prague. So tell them a little bit about yours, Jim. 

Jim Palmer: So it's It's called antennas 101, but I changed the name and I don't even know, remember what we changed it to at this point, but basically it's all about radios and radio waves and antennas and how and we, we kind of go into even RF cables and connectors and we play with radios and we play with radio waves using ham radio because it's something that we can do and we can get the gear for and we can look at it.

Because it's really easy to push a big giant button on the side of a radio and have it make RF and allow us to look at it. One of the problems with Wi-Fi is it transmits so quickly, they have gear that you can look at the RF, is very expensive. So I found a cheaper way to do it. So it's, and it was really popular last year, you know.

We had a really great time. I think we had 30 people in the class and it was kind of crazy. And then this past spring in Phoenix, we got a little even more crazier. And so it's always a good time. Yeah, you did. 

John Deegan: I just, I just kept you well hydrated. That's all I'll say. 

Jim Palmer: We were, we were hydrated, especially day two.

It was very hydrated and lubricated. It was pretty fun. 

John Deegan: It's hot in Phoenix, you know, even in February. 

Jim Palmer: It is. 

John Deegan: It's pretty hot in Phoenix. 

Jim Palmer: So, so if you're, if you're interested go ahead and register and sign up for that. And I will see you in that. And that is two, three, or yeah, it's two, three hour classes on the first and second day of the conference.

So if you just, if you can't make the bootcamp, come sign up for my deep dive or... sign 

John Deegan: There's there's a there's another boot camp 

Jim Palmer: Deep Dive 

John Deegan: with the sound deep dive see now. I'm gonna bark at myself again deep dive I put this one. This was actually out for Phoenix and didn't quite fly and that's okay.

But this is one. We've been actually cooking up for I don't know probably about a year now it feels like but it's it's basically doing a home lab and the the the impetus behind this, and I'm trying to use the big words, the impetus behind this was simply, you know, I remember when I started as an SE and didn't know anything, and now I'm a couple years into being an SE and I still don't know anything, but building a home lab where you don't screw up everybody else in your home, you know, if you, if you're, if you're like us and you've got other human beings that live under the same roof it's.

For some of those really smart people, you're not going to want to come to this class because you probably already know this and you're sitting there listening to this going, well, duh. But the idea was, you know, entry level or early career. Because that's the, the thing I looked at it with, and we kind of talked about this, right?

The boot camps and the, well, I'm sorry, the deep dives. I'm going to beat myself up over this. I'm going to have to drink every time I say the wrong word. I don't have a liver for that. But anyways, you look at some of the deep dives, and they're more advanced. Or they can get really advanced really quickly.

And so my kind of idea was... For all of the audience at a WLPC that's, like, super advanced, has been there for many, many years, and knows this inside and out, and has enough gear for 18 home labs, there's that new person. It's their first or second conference, they're still kind of getting started, they're not sure what they need to do to really be able to build up something at home and test.

And so that was kind of the idea was, you know, let's get a MikroTik router, excuse me, because we both like them and use them. You know, set up some, you know, VLANs and some routing and, you know, play and break stuff. And we've got, you know, I think there was a a tablet or some other budget friendly test device to, to do some, you know, high, not, you know, not just like NetScout level stuff, but like, tools and tests and things like that.

And I'm doing a really horrible job of selling this, but that was kind of the idea. Like, you want to start doing a home lab, and you don't want to take your kids off the internet while you're doing it. You know that that's kind of where this went to so it should be fun I was looking forward to trying to do it in Phoenix.

I think you and I had had some really good ideas for it. So Maybe it'll fly. Maybe it won't we'll see we'll find out a couple weeks. 

Jim Palmer: So to boil the ocean, MikroTik is a really good router Except it is expert friendly and so people know that they're like, Oh yeah, I can get a MikroTik router and then I can put it on my home network and then I can build my lab stuff off of it.

But how do I do that? How do I build that? What are some of the tools? What are some of the tricks? And so I think the idea behind John's deep dive is if you've always wanted or you know you needed a home lab that was separate from your family and their production network. Okay. So, you know, this is a way that you can come to John's class, you can get a MikroTik router, you can go through the process of building it up, of getting it ready, and then you can take it home and plug it right into your home network and voila, you're going to have a lab network.

If not, I think mine, I have like 11 or 12 lab networks. And so, you know, But it's all separate and so I can play and I can I can do things. I can do packet captures. I got firewalls. I can do all these cool things and so if that's something that you need if you're especially for people starting out who know that they need the lab who need to have all this stuff, but don't want to break their family and network and their use of the net of the Wi-Fi and stuff And you you don't have the this is a this is a great class.

This is a great way to do it and And who knows if we can get our rooms right next to each other, maybe I'll just, you know, I'll spill over or you, we'll just have a grand time. So 

John Deegan: I was going to say, if we do that, that's, that's either really good planning or really bad planning, depending on how you look at it.

Jim Palmer: Last year, last year I was next to, in Prague, I was next to, I want to say it was the WLANPi people, I think, I don't remember who, but I, they told me they were like, yeah, they're like, we heard you guys. 

John Deegan: My, my, my biggest problem with both the deep dive and the bootcamp when it was going into Phoenix, because I obviously only did the, the bootcamp.

But I was, I was like, please don't put me next to Phil. I don't want to be next to the hacking bootcamp. Cause I just, no, they wouldn't do that. But anyways, so I, yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward to it. I hope it's a good time. Obviously, if, if enough people register, then unfortunately you'll get to see me in Prague.

Jim Palmer: So, there you go. There's our special episode about WLPC. 

John Deegan: And we kept it to under five minutes. If you play it in slow motion. 

Jim Palmer: You have to play it in like three times speed. 

John Deegan: Oh, that's right, 

that's right. We want to speed this up. Yeah, play this like 4x and then we'll be good. This will be under five minutes, I think.

But yeah, so hopefully we'll see you guys in Prague. Registration opens in a couple weeks and Jim even got voted to talk too. 

Jim Palmer: So one more plug on this. There's, there's going to be some other RUCKUS folks that are gonna be there, so yeah, so it's not just me and John are gonna be there, so, you know, if you're interested in RUCKUS, if you wanna learn more about RUCKUS, if you want to possibly.

Well, I won't tease that too much. Come, come to, come to WLPC Prague and and come check us out. So there we go, John. I think that's it. 

John Deegan: All right. I'm going to hit the music and then we're going to call it one. See ya. 

Jim Palmer: Bye.