For the second year in a row, Rack Gives Back participated in the San Antonio Witte Museum’s Science and Technology Day in celebration of National Engineer’s Week. This event brings together local companies, organizations and clubs with a technical focus to interact with museum visitors for an afternoon.
This is my favorite RGB event, primarily because of a game some of our Rackspace Engineers invented called Packet Loss.
Packet Loss simulates a DDOS, or distributed denial of service attack. Through the use of colored bean bags, we demonstrate simply how the data you send over the internet gets to its destination. An adult stands in the center of a circle of kids; most of the kids are wearing costumes made to look like servers with blue LEDs. They represent servers, laptops, mobile smart phones, personal computers, and any other device that carries a network IP address. We hand the children an assortment of bean bags, and tell them they are their packets (mail). Packets, like mail, contain the to and from addresses, content information, and any other transfer information to make sure the router (mail person) knows where to send it. Simply put, they are the senders and receivers of the letters. The adult plays the role of a network router, which is the device that acts as a mail person taking incoming mail and sorting it into the bins for their destination.
The group is then given examples of two basic methods of sending network data (wired/wireless). A wired transfer is demonstrated by a physical hand off of the bean bag. The wireless transfer is shown as a toss to and from the router and children. On the average 100Mbs network, one could possibly pass over 140,000 packets (bean bags) a second. Try getting the kids and parents to get anywhere close. It’s fun to watch! Just when you think it’s gotten out of hand, we introduce the DDOS – Distributed Denial of Service is an attack on a single location by MANY computers on the net, aimed at disrupting the traffic flow of or taking down the target. Hackers will often exploit unsecured systems, to provide themselves with this powerful network of others’ systems to do so.
Here’s where the fun happens. Just like the unsuspecting system that is attacked on the internet, the adult (router) is about to be bombarded unexpectedly. Packets still flying, and after a brief explanation of DDOS, the speaker of the game grabs a box of MORE bean bags, and tosses them all at once onto the router. It gets a good laugh, and some of the participating parents drop to the floor in a dramatic meltdown which could possibly be a good example of what a router feels like when this happens.
This year’s event added two new components from last year – robots and bugs. With a target audience of elementary school kids, both of these additions were a hit!
Lego makes amazing robot Mind Storm® sets where folks can build their own robots out of Lego pieces, and create programs on their computers to make the robots move. Rackers added an extra component, downloading software to enable robot control via a cell phone. These are great toys and were tons of fun!
The electronic bugs at last year’s event lived in a mere cardboard box. This year, they were upgraded to their own high rise maze:
The rarely seen in nature purple variety can be seen here:
Seeing museum visitors interact with the bugs, and the other exhibits in the Rackspace room, was amazing. Kids got so excited about everything there to play and interact with, from cracked open servers to server costumes. As one Racker volunteer pointed out, the kids asking questions at the robotics table could be future Rackers. All of the volunteers loved the opportunity to interact with such inquisitive kids and the families, and really enjoyed the afternoon. Sharing some of our technical passion with our community was a great way to spend a Saturday.
Blog post contributed by Erin Mulkey, Marketing Analyst for Rackspace Hosting
