Freebsd

…hit me again (in a positive way). i was experimenting in my lab and wanted to define a lot of queues (and i mean a lot of them) in ALTQ. unfortunately, very quickly during parsing of pf.conf pfctl barked out following information: pfctl: DIOCADDALTQ: Cannot allocate memory to overcome the problem, you only need to modify those three files: /usr/include/altq/altq_hfsc.h /usr/src/sbin/pfctl/missing/altq/altq_hfsc.h /usr/src/sys/contrib/altq/altq/altq_hfsc.h where #define HFSC_MAX_CLASSES 64 is defined - to requested value. then rebuild the kernel and everything should work as expected. ...

traditionally for last couple of years engineering team at Cisco Poland is taking care of securing infrastructure for Wielkia Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy. this year i decided to launch experimental support for IPv6 - while we were not allowed to move all infrastructure to IPv6, it should be possible next year. everyone that has IPv6 access can point browser to ipv6.wosp.org.pl. everything works based on reverse-proxy provided by Apache, FreeBSD and Cisco MCS server :) ...

we’re nearing end of calendar year. i’d highly recommend to consider donating to FreeBSD project with your own money, if you (like me) are using FreeBSD everywhere, where stability, availability, performance, security and scalability is critical.

there’s a very interesting page that shows what’s upcoming in FreeBSD 8 release.

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. ...

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.

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 ;)