if you haven’t seen my practical demonstration at SecureCON 2007, you can see extended version on this thursday - i’ll be visiting AGH in Cracow at 7:45pm to do “show & tell” session as part of netWork sessions. session will be extended as we’ll have more time. photos can be found here and more information about the session itself can be found here.
on the network throughput front, we’re fighting (albeit in distributed manner) for getting throughput from commodity PC hardware on par with dedicated, hardware routing platforms. with OSes like Linux and BSD. to that end, recent document published after last Linux Congress in Hamburg shows that while it’s important to select proper multi-core CPU and motherboard to do fast traffic forwarding, we’re still hitting bottleneck at around 1Mpps. curiously enough, on one of the slides you can spot information, that large FIB in Linux doesn’t impact performance too much. you can’t say that about some of the older, legacy solutions using different FIB tricks - like for example compression. you can also find some interesting information about Linux kernel tuning. you may remember than years ago NetFPGA was published, using Xilinx chipset. it’s still 4 GE ports, but quite efficient and with readily available SDK. ...
thanks to Mirosław Kwaśniak, who in his very own time managed to find a way to generate PDF with polish letters - i was able to publish PDF that renders properly. thank you!
my article on defending networks from DDoS attacks was just published in online version of NetWorld magazine.
6 people responded to my call for a Cisco FAQ PL conversion idea up until today… but unfortunately there are no results so far. well, maybe it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself … in unrelated, but more optimistic news - a week ago i finished delivering SMB Bootcamp for Cisco partners. there was a lot of work (3 days, 12-14 hours each). you can read a bit about it in the link above on the CCIE.PL forum (i’d like to invite you to visit it). but everything thats good ends quickly - the equipment was packed and we went home. ...
for all of those that are starting to make first steps with VoIP, or believe know everything - i’d like to highly recommend my fathers book that was just published via BTC publishing house. it covers both H.323 and SIP protocols, along with all auxiliary topics - like integration, and signaling over middleboxes like packet filters and stateful firewalls: Telefonia VoIP. Multimedialne sieci IP, Marek Bromirski, ISBN: 83-60233-07-1
for the next two-three weeks there will be no new posts. i’m preparing move of my server from Białystok to Warsaw. old, tired IBM PII-233 will be replaced by new IBM x306. if everything goes well, you’ll see no change. in the meantime i should be able to push new revision of Cisco FAQ PL plus some other stuff.
i dedicate this short article to all pc maniacs.
let me quote NetCraft with regards to most stable hosting companies: Seven of the top nine sites run on FreeBSD. The exceptions are Datapipe, which is doing a fine job of promoting the reliability of Windows 2003, and German hosting company komplex.net which runs on Linux. i wouldn’t like to argue which OS is best to hosting… it’s quite obvious ;)
i never thought that i’ll be bothered by SCO argument with Open Source community, and with Linux in particular. it seems SCO tried desperately to build credibility by claiming Linux broke copyrights, where there such things took place. reading Linus post how SCO was sending demanding emails to those targeted as easy prey, in pathetic attempt to get some money before rolling up and dying. SCO supposedly is going to take BSD in crosshairs as well “soon”, but i wish them all the worst, including bankrupcy with all my heart (in line with christmas spirit). ...