Testing Network And TCP Optimizations

This post is more like a “note to self” for certain TCP parameters which I usually modify (or plan to modify) on production servers.
Some good to know terms:

• Round Trip Time (RTT): It is the time taken by a packet from source machine to reach destination and come back. You can use ICMP ping to get the RTT.
• Latency: The time from the source sending a packet to the destination receiving it. This is often mixed with RTT. Clarify what you are talking about before interpreting anything.
• Bandwidth Delay Product (BDP): It is the amount of data that can be in transit in the network or simply the product of link bandwidth and RTT.

read more…

KindleBerry Pi

We left our little studio in the Kootenays last July to travel throughout Europe, traveling to discover about new media, spiritual centers, art, design and open source initiative. I decided to go really minimal on the computer gear stuff, so I only packed my Kindle,  a camera, an android phone and of course my Raspberry

read more...

Eureka – mid-tier load balancer

With Netflix running so many services on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud, it needs to be able to find those services easily so that it can balance loads and manage failover. The video-streaming specialists have now open sourced Eureka, the software they use to meet that challenge.

read more…

OpenStack Quantum

Quantum, a core part of the OpenStack project starting with the next Folosm release, aims to allow the software above the stack to control that infrastructure through a well-defined interface – an API that developers can access.

read more…

What is Chef ?

Chef is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. No matter how complex the realities of your business, Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout your entire infrastructure. Because it combines the fundamental elements of configuration management and service oriented architectures with the full power of Ruby, Chef makes it easy to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure.

read more…

What is Puppet ?

Puppet is IT automation software that helps system administrators manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to patch management and compliance. Using Puppet, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage change, scaling from 10s of servers to 1000s, on-premise or in the cloud.

read more…

Cloonix : Another userspace for KVM

Cloonix KVM is an alternative userspace for KVM designed specifically for simple realtime network topology management.  The killer feature of Cloonix is a GUI WYSIWYG tool that allows you to drag and drop elements in a network topology.  These elements include virtual machines, routers, LAN interfaces and sniffers among others. Networking uses a rewritten slirp userspace library so performance is not great but this is the tradeoff for the convenience of modifying your topology in real time in a graphical way.

read more…

What is Baruwa ?

It provides an easy to use interface for managing a MailScanner installation. It is used to perform operations such as releasing quarantined messages, bayesian learning, whitelisting and blacklisting addresses, monitoring the health of the services etc. Baruwa is implemented using web 2.0 features (AJAX) where deemed fit, graphing is also implemented on the client side using SVG, Silverlight or VML. Baruwa has full support for i18n, letting you support any language of your choosing.

read more...

SquidGuard Web Filter For Squid 3.x

How do I install and configure SquidGuard – a web filter plugin for Squid to restrict access to domains/URLs based upon access control lists? How do I block porn, gambling, and other web-sites using squid proxy server version 3.x under Debian or Ubuntu Linux server for my school ?

read more…

IPSEC VPN with Strongswan 5

This howto describes setting up an IPSEC VPN for use with the Iphone, Ipad and Mac OSX VPN clients on Centos/RHEL 6. I am using the 5.x branch of Strongswan which is now the mainline actively maintained branch. At the time of writing the 5.x EPEL package was only available in the testing repo.

read more…

Building a PBX with the Raspberry Pi

When talking about PBX setups the most common software package is Asterisk. That’s what’s at work here, rolled up with a bunch of other helpful software in an RPi targeted distro called Incredible PBX. All it takes to get up and running is to partition and burn the image to an SD like any other RPi distro.

read more…

What is Kaltura ?

Kaltura provides the world’s first and only Open Source Online Video Platform. Our platform includes industry leading media management applications as well as a framework for developing custom apps. That basically means that we provide you with flexible video solutions to cover all of your needs – both now and in the future.

read more…

Rike project management

Rike enables teams to autonomously administer their tasks according to the kanban principle and to thus work in a more focused manner. The meta-ticketing/planning tool is based on the kanban principle and embraces elements of other agile methods like extreme programming or scrum. With Rike, team members autonomously choose their tasks according to the so-called “pull principle”. Thereby, all team members are equally challenged and able to bring their individual strengths to the table. By minimizing simultaneously pending tasks, Rike reduces the throughput time for individual tasks.

read more…

openHAB Introduction

The open Home Automation Bus (openHAB) project aims at providing a universal integration platform for all things around home automation. It is a pure Java solution, fully based on OSGi. The Equinox OSGi runtime and Jetty as a web server build the core foundation of the runtime. It is designed to be absolutely vendor-neutral as well as hardware/protocol-agnostic. openHAB brings together different bus systems, hardware devices and interface protocols by dedicated bindings.

read more…

CFEngine – Configuration Management

CFEngine automates large-scale IT computing infrastructure: ensuring the availability, security and compliance of mission-critical applications and services. Based on popular and flexible open source configuration management software, CFEngine configuration management products are highly scalable through decentralized, autonomous agents that can continuously monitor, self-repair, and update the IT infrastructure of a global multi-site enterprise – with negligible impact on system resources or performance.

read more…