The Sysctl Labs Blog

[IT] My IT wishlist for 2012 (part 4 - CPL-enabled server PSUs)

2012-01-19T23:12:00.002Z

Imagine a connection between your favorite server's BMC and the PSUs inside that server...

Now imagine the BMC communicates (if asked to do so) the Serial of the server and the ID of the PSU to the PDU through CPL...

Now you get the idea, automated server inventory from the PDU so that you can simply shutdown or reset a server, router, load-balancer or whatever from the PDU (you know when things go really bad and IPMI or console is not an option or simply not working)...

Of course the PDU would be filtering the CPL so that you are not pushing bad harmonics back to the power grid (which is something you will be billed for).

This is the last step for a "content-aware datacenter" :
- network : CDP or LLDP
- hardware : IPMI + more recently... agentless hardware monitoring
- power : intelligent PSU with CPL communication to the PDU (let's call it iPSU)

You could imagine a lot of other things going through iPSU, like being able to control or meter more power-related things in the server.

Now that would be a smart datacenter...

[MISC] New Car

2012-01-18T00:35:00.003Z

I love it...

[IT] My IT wishlist for 2012 (part 3 - Virtualize the backplane)

2011-12-30T13:13:00.003Z

My IT wishlist for 2012 (part 3 - Virtualize the backplane)

A few weeks ago I had a demo of Cisco UCS blade hardware and I find it pretty nice.

What's really nice is that the "Service Profile" technology of the UCS allows to move a complete configuration (BIOS settings/all firmwares/boot settings/MAC-address/etc) from one server (blade) to another. Now while this is really perfect for virtualization with a FCoE/iSCSI storage systems, I feel that the solution hasn't been really thought for those who would like to use local storage... these systems are mainly designed for those who only want 2 disks in their blades (again, when using local disks).

So my guess is that the next thing that needs to be virtualized is the backplane. This way you could have 8 blades, 16 blades or even 32 blades systems connected through multi-lane SAS to a huge "storage chassis" which would actually be only a big SAS endpoint which would allow to attribute bandwidth (SAS lanes) to servers (ie: give a web server 1x SAS 6G and a sql server 4x SAS 6G). Obviously, you would also be able to dedicate some disks to these servers, this way the blades would be almost diskless but still you would be able to add storage to your servers without the need for FCoE or iSCSI systems which both need you to learn and test much more things than what is usually used on simple web platform.

The idea here is to create almost ready-to-deploy racks full of servers and storage...
Why would you want to deploy iSCSI or FCoE, if you have a nearline SAS solution that answers your needs ans simplifies your infrastructure ?

Here is how it would look in a rack :

Obviously there would be a link between the DAS systems and the UCS switch/manager (UCS 6120) so that you would be able to manage the storage boxes with the same GUI/scripts as the rest of the rack.

Now that's "all-in-one" :)

[IT] My IT wishlist for 2012 (part 2 - Webtop/SmartTop)

2011-12-30T12:06:00.003Z

My IT wishlist for 2012 (part 2 - Webtop/SmartTop)

Motorola all started it with the Atrix (and the upcoming Atrix2) but for me this is clearly where personal and enterprise computing should go...

This is how Motorola thought about it :

I think the future will be made of SmartTop's, you'll have a decent CPU in your mobile + RAM + Disk + a PCIe bus...

When you plug it to the "docking station PC", you would get :
- Super-HD graphics thanks to a PCIe card inside the station
- Maybe more processing power thanks to a FPU-like unit (back to the good old days) which might be integrated to the graphic card anyway (GPGPU-style)
- A big screen, at least 13"
- Two other disk drives :
- One which will automatically (differentially) replicate what's inside your mobile when you connect it;
- A big 1TB+ drive for storing whatever you need to store only on the lesser-mobile device.

Also, I think Motorola's design is flawed, you don't want your mobile device at the back of the SmartTop, you want it as the trackpad (in purple on the picture below) !

[IT] My IT wishlist for 2012 (part 1 - SSD Tiering)

2011-12-30T11:42:00.004Z

My IT wishlist for 2012 (part 1 - SSD Tiering) :

Hybrid-Storage in servers

I've been a big fan of SSD technology from the very beginning, I've run or tested :
- Samsung's Hybrid HDD (a failure)
- HyperDrive's 4 and 5 (RAM-based SSD) with battery and CompactFlash backup => works fine
- Gigabyte i-Ram (RAM-based SSD) battery-backed => works fine but limited capacity
- Intel X25-E and HP Gen1 SSDs => works fine, but many failure with database workloads even though they are SLC
- Fusion-IOs PCIe => perfect, but expensive
- Pliant (now SanDisk) SSDs => perfect too, less expensive than the Fusion-IOs
- various consumer-class SSDs (Crucial, RunCore, Intel)

As SSD prices go down and need for fast and big data processing, it's more and more relevant to use tiered-storage (also called hybrid-storage or Tier-0 storage) :

This technology is coming from high-end SAN systems like Pillar Data system's and others...

The idea is pretty simple, while your favorite RAID controller's max RAM cache did increase over time, from 128MB (2000's) to 256MB and now 512MB (LSI) and 1GB (HP) or even 4GB (Areca). This amount of cache helps but can't cope with today's need for ultra-fast and extra-large cache in front of your favorite SAS or SATA drives... This is where the Hybrid cache comes and efficiently caches a good part of the most used data you are using. You then have 3 layers of cache in front of the "slow" drives : OS caching (mostly read), RAID Ctrl RAM cache (often 75% write, 25% read), SSD cache (read and write).

A bit of reading on this topic (all from LSI) :
http://www.demartek.com/Demartek_LSI_CacheCade_Performance_Evaluation_2010-11.html
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Advanced%20Software/LSI%20MegaRAID%20CacheCade%20Software/Demartek_LSI_CacheCade_Performance_Evaluation_2010-11.pdf
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Advanced%20Software/LSI%20MegaRAID%20CacheCade%20Software/CacheCadePro2_TechBrief_080211_uk.pdf

Now imagine a server like the Dell PowerEdge C1100 with 2 x 200G SLC SSDs and 8 x 900G SAS drives, that's a nice database server in 1U...

Dell also announced that they will be able to provide SSD 2.5" drives which will be directly connected as PCIe cards in their next-gen servers (a kind of hot-plug Fusion-IO). That's nice but for some reasons (probably lack of space inside the 1U server) they won't allow 2 x PCIe-SSD + 8 x SAS HDD, only 2 SSD + 4 SAS HDD...

Anyway, this is clearly our future !

While on the consumer market there has been many failure to do this, probably mainly because they were trying to fit everything inside the HDD itself, there seems to be new approaches to the issue which will probably be more successful :
- Hybrid drive with "Tiering controller" + SSD + HDD on a PCIe-card : OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid PCI Express
- Software-based Tiering as seen on OCZ Synapse Cache which is basically a classic SSD Drive + Nvelo's Dataplex software (http://nvelo.com/products.html)

[Home Automation] Turning ON/OFF your Cambridge Audio Azur 840A (Version 2)

2011-05-07T11:15:00.006+01:00

So you have a Cambridge Audio Amplifier (or any other product with a serial port) and a null-modem cable and want to be able to control your amplifier from a Linux PC (a web page or CLI). Here's a quick HOW TO...

Say you've connected it to /dev/ttyS0.

Step 1 - allowing anonymous/apache/everyone to write to /dev/ttyS0
echo "/bin/chmod 666 /dev/ttyS0" >> /etc/rc.local

Step 2 - PHP function to start/stop the amplifier
function cambridge_pstate($w) {
$line="";
$fp=fopen("/dev/ttyS0","r+");
if($w=="ON") fputs($fp,"#1,11,1\r\n");
if($w=="OFF") fputs($fp,"#1,11,0\r\n");
while($line=fgets($fp,16)) if($line!="") break;
fclose($fp);
if(substr($line,0,2)=="#4") return true;
else return false;
}

Step 3 - Use the fonction in a PHP page
if(cambridge_pstate("ON")) echo "Starting the amplifier...";
else echo "Could not start the amplifier...";

... and obviously, the opposite :
if(cambridge_pstate("OFF")) echo "Stopping the amplifier...";
else echo "Could not start the amplifier...";

So much for "intelligent" ads :)

2011-05-01T00:08:00.002+01:00

Nice one...

CTR must have been quite low on these ads :)

Rootzmap as seen on...

2010-10-29T00:00:00.007+01:00

There's been quite some buzz around the rootzmap's pictures recently.

They've been featured on BBC4 and BBC Mundo websites and TV shows.

They also have been shown at the German Museum of Technology during an exhibition celebrating computer pioneer Konrad Zuse's 100th Birthday.

And finally in this book about Science.

...and at various small exhibitions in the UK and US.

Crawler starting to look High-Tech

2010-02-17T02:17:00.003Z

Atom motherboard

2009-12-28T22:26:00.003Z

Here is the board and its case.
The 1 GB CF is a bit too small, I'll get a bigger one soon.
Also, the holes for the 2.5" disk do not match my 44 pin cable length, so I'll create new holes for it.

Robotic Crawler Video

2009-12-24T12:23:00.002Z

Olivier made a video of his HSP Crawler first run, which I edited and put on dailymotion, so here it is :

Don't know how it will handle the 1kg Atom motherboard on top (we might break the weakest parts...), but looks promising...

Unmanned Vehicle Project

2009-12-20T14:27:00.008Z

With Philippe we have the project, since a very long time, to build an mobile camera, well, let's say a robot !
There's a lot of robot projects around the net, but one of the main identified problem is their lack of "agility".
That's why, for our first tests, we have prefered to choose a well proven basis instead of an "university project", the HSP Crawler : http://www.hispeedmodel.com/product.asp?bianhao=94880
Here in it's original configuration as i have received it :

JPEG and PNG thumbnailing

2009-07-18T14:24:00.005+01:00

In need for a fast and good looking thumbnailing solution for PNG and JPEG bitmaps, I came across this interesting article about Python's PIL and its rivals (Epeg and Imagemagick), so I decided to bench these solutions myself (even more since the various possible resizing methods were not tested).

For my bench, the thumbnail size is 320x200, which is quite a big thumbnail, but why not... (time is in seconds)

I'm no Python fanboy, but it looks like Python Image Library (in Bicubic mode) offers the best ratio speed/quality when you need to create thumbnails from jpeg and png.

Cable goes HD

2009-02-21T00:53:00.001Z

Now I have access to HD channels (720p)... and still a good connectivity.

[Netlantis] New Server

2009-01-11T16:46:00.004Z

I've just finished building a new server for Netlantis.

It has the following specs :
1 x Intel e8500 CPU
4 x 2 GB RAM PC6400 CL4
2 x Gigabyte iRAM 4 GB (in RAID 0)
2 x Seagate 250 GB HDD (in RAID 1)
1 x Seagate 250 GB spare HDD

Because of the size of the iRAM (and the bad design of this ASUS P5Q-Premium motherboard) I had to build some custom pieces (which was actually fun) and to use a 13 cm flexible PCI riser (bought on LinITX).

Here's what the server looks like :

If I were to build such a system now (I have my iRAM since 1 year now), I would choose an HyperDrive5 16GB drive... read more here. It has a disk (actually a compact flash) for backups (which is to me a better idea than a battery), has a better architecture, and is less expensive.

[Thoughts] Snow in Paris

2009-01-11T16:15:00.003Z

Such a nice sunny morning in Paris, with a bit of snow...

[Thoughts] New controller for my X10 setup

2008-11-22T19:09:00.001Z

While I was getting a special PCI riser for the new Netlantis server, I've decided to get a 8" LCD Touchscreen (from Linitx).
This product is really nice and easy to setup under Linux.

The idea for this screen is to replace my current X10 control, which only allows me to power on or off everything.

I created an image and a very simple script which calls heyu...

Here's the image.

And the screen, once installed and running.

[Thoughts] The stradivarius of Headphones

2008-11-08T09:54:00.001Z

Notice the capital H to Headphones here, we're talking about high quality (and price) audio.

The Beyerdynamic DT 770 ed. 2005 is not just another headphone, to me it's an experience (wow, that sounds like crappy oldschool marketing). Let me clarify...
With this headphones, even the worst piece of 128k MP3 sounds like your getting a personal visit from the artist and his band. An experience you can only experience with very expensive loudspeakers, like these :

Sonus Faber Stradivari Homage :

Monitor Audio Platinum PL300 :

[SYSCTL] New Cyberabuse Whois 5.5 is out

2008-07-19T08:05:00.001+01:00

This new version corrects a few minor bug and improves a few things.

As always, this new version is the best available, anyone using the cyberabuse whois should upgrade.

5.4 was released in 2006, so this is a long awaited release.

I'll detail the ChangeLog right here :

- fix Makefile for Win32
at least on the latest cygwin version, the current "make sqlite" didn't work, now it does
- gcc 2 compat issue
well, this one was introduced with the "make mta" thing
- get rid of that lame and big ascii art
- default TLDs libs have been updated
- TLD includes generator has been updated
- removed support for sqlite 2.x, upgrade to 3.x
- fixed a small bug in the ARIN cache system
honestly I don't remember what this bug was... it may have been fixed in 2006 or 2007
- fixed typo in INSTALL file for "make server"
- added better checks for netname and inetnum for KRNIC
- various improvement for LACNIC
- added "make mta" for those who use zcw to add abuse headers at the MTA level
that's not such a good idea... but I'll let people choose what they do with their mta
- added "make sqlite-spam" for those who use zcw to report spam
zcw was made to report abuse/security issues
this is probably the most awaited feature... I must say I'm not really a fan of this one and I don't know if it's going to be more efficient than the classic (sqlite) version...
- make strstr case insensitive when the searched string is lowercase
shouldn't change anything (email search), but who knows

I'm happy that this tool is still in use... it's now 5 years old !

[Thoughts] Hi-Fi upgrade

2008-07-12T16:48:00.000+01:00

Big upgrade of my hi-fi system.

My Inter-M (Inkel) amplifier has been replaced by a Cambridge Audio 840A(v2).

Sound is really getting better, I don't miss the very dynamic sound of the Inter-M.

Long time listening of this system is now a much better pleasure and stereo image has been really boosted...

[SYSCTL] Lighttpd separate Error Log for 404's

2008-04-29T20:33:00.002+01:00

You might have seen that my lighttpd conf doesn't include an access log... in fact I don't even load mod_accesslog.

Why would I want or even need to log access to my static content... you might need it, but I don't. Also, since I run multiple workers, even if I wanted to log server accesses, the log file would be broken (logs + multiple workers are not handled well at the moment).

However, if I don't care about 200s, I do need to get my 404 errors logged...
Apache logs 404s and > 400 in the error_log file, but Lighty doesn't (it uses access.log for that). However there's a nice feature called "server.error-handler-404" to bypass this issue.

This is how I use it... in the conf file :
server.error-handler-404 = "/errors/log_errors.x"
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".x" )
fastcgi.server = ( "/your_noatime_.../static/errors/log_errors.x" => ((
"bin-path" => "/usr/local/bin/log_errors.x",
"host" => "127.0.0.1",
"port" => 8200, # (why not...)
"min-procs" => 1,
"max-procs" => 1,
"check-local" => "disable"
))
)

touch /your_noatime_mounted_partition/static/errors/log_errors.x

Install FastCGI dev lib from :
http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/fcgi.tar.gz

Then edit log_errors.c :
#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include "fcgi_config.h"
#include "fcgi_stdio.h"
#include <stdlib.h>
int main () {
FCGI_FILE *err = FCGI_fopen("/your/path/to/error.log","a");
if(!err) return 1;
while (FCGI_Accept() >= 0) {
time_t rawtime;
char buf [80];
time(&rawtime);
strftime(buf,80,"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S",localtime(&(rawtime)));
char *uri = getenv("REQUEST_URI");
FCGI_fprintf(err,"[%s] 404 : %s\n",buf,uri);
// FCGI_fflush(err); - if low traffic and realtime logs desired
printf("Content-type: text/html\r\nRefresh: 0;url=/nice_message.html\r\n\r\n");
}
FCGI_fclose(err);
return 0;
}
// EOF

Then :
gcc -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -Wall -O2 -o log_errors.x log_errors.c -lfcgi
mv log_errors.x /usr/local/bin/log_errors.x

And that's it...
Oh, this is not the most beautiful piece of code you can find... but it does the job.
I'll be happy to get better code if you write it...

[SYSCTL] Testing Lighttpd

2008-04-15T21:53:00.001+01:00

In need for a server that would serve only static content (small files), but at the highest rate possible, I've tested Nginx, Lighty and Apache.

While Apache is clearly out of the game, Nginx wasn't that bad, however lighty 1.4.19 clearly achieved the best performance (even better than 1.5.0 with sendfile-aio) and was much better documented.

Since I thought I was really wasting my time testing different parameters (which many other probably already did) to achieve the best performance, I'm posting my config file here in hope it will be useful.

server.document-root = "/your_noatime_mounted_partition/static"
server.errorlog = "/your_noatime_.../logs/lighttpd.error.log"
server.event-handler = "linux-sysepoll"
server.network-backend = "linux-sendfile"
server.max-fds = 8192
server.max-connections = 4096
server.stat-cache-engine = "simple"
server.max-worker = 4 # (= number of CPU)
server.max-read-idle = 60
server.max-write-idle = 360
server.max-keep-alive-requests = 1024
server.max-keep-alive-idle = 16
server.bind = "127.0.0.1"
server.port = 80
dir-listing.activate = "disable"
etag.use-inode = "enable"
etag.use-mtime = "enable"
static-file.etags = "enable"
server.username = "your_favorite_anonymous_user"
server.groupname = "your_favorite_anonymous_group"
mimetype.assign = (
".swf" => "application/x-shockwave-flash",
".gif" => "image/gif",
".jpg" => "image/jpeg",
".jpeg" => "image/jpeg",
".png" => "image/png"
)

You can then use mod_mem_cache if you want even better performance...

[Netlantis] From Netlantis to FRNOG Tools

2008-03-01T08:21:00.003Z

Some of my BGP related projects will now exist under 2 different "brands" :
- Netlantis
- FRnOG Tools

Here's the logo :

This might be temporary and we can only hope for the Netlantis projet's revival in a few months (years).

[SYSCTL] FreeBSD 7.0

2008-03-01T07:39:00.002Z

One of my (FreeBSD) servers has been up for more than 3 years without the need for a reboot...
# w
8:38AM up 1138 days, 7:05, 1 user, load averages: 1.05, 1.35, 1.37
This one is serving something like 100 GB of data per day, the box is from 2000, a dual P3 Xeon 500 Mhz with 384 MB RAM...

This makes you wonder why the trend for switching from Windows to *nix hasn't been faster :)

Though it's nice to see so many devices running a *nix (mostly Linux) around us everyday. When Linux Phones will come to the mass market, people will be surprised to have a stable smartphone again (I have to soft-reboot my Win Mobile 2005 at least every 2-3 weeks). Though I really can't see why companies still stick with Linux... since the license (GPL) is clearly not the most flexible, compared to the BSD one, for example.

The very new FreeBSD 7.0 is available for download since a few days and runs on ARM CPUs (those used in mobile devices). NetBSD runs on ARM since a few years... Strange to see how some so tactical/important decisions are made.

Even though I'm still a FreeBSD lover, I mostly install CentOS (RedHat Entreprise clone) in production environment, because to me, it's simply the most production-ready *nix available to date.

[Netlantis] RANX beta

2008-02-07T07:34:00.000Z

You can try RANX beta, HERE.

The RANX Graph feature is the one to be tested, the rest of the website is simple XHTML and should work on most modern browsers.

For this website, I've used several open-source libraries :
menus (which I've enhanced) : Dynamic Drive CSS Library,
RANX graph drawing library from Walter Zorn
(you may wonder why I've used a javascritp/DHTML lib to draw shapes dynamically... the answer is quite simple... I don't know Flash and I know several hardcore-GNUs who don't have it installed...),
the data for the RANX Graph are in AJAX/JSON format.

There's still a bit of work and optimization to do, but I must admit I like it already :) It's been really interesting working with these technologies that make 2.0 exist (namely, DHTML/CSS, XHTML, AJAX).

Don't hesitate to report bugs you can find.

[Thoughts] End-of-transmission - Changing Job

2008-01-12T00:51:00.000Z

For those who used to contact me through my work e-mail pbourcier _at_ citali.com, this e-mail address won't be working anymore since yesterday was my last day at this company.

I'll be working for Criteo from now on... more stories on my new 2.0 work-life later :)

[Netlantis] RANX

2007-12-11T00:11:00.000Z

I'm working on a new Netlantis project right now, called RANX.

The project is based on an AS Ranking code and concept from PhD Mickael Meulle from France Telecom R&D.

You can read his presentation at NANOG 40 by clicking here.

More infos later...

[Thoughts] Hand's fix0red...

2007-11-08T11:06:00.000Z

It should look like this under X-rays now...

Question is... does it beep at the airport ? :)

[Thoughts] Audiophile PC

2007-10-28T00:25:00.000+01:00

I've decided to get myself a new home-built silent and "green" (as in energy-efficient) PC...

My needs were :
- pro optical audio output
- 3 video output (for my dual-screen + my HDTV)
- totally silent !
- less than 1000 euros

It works really nice, so here's my recipe :
Asus M2A-VM HDMI Micro-ATX Motherboard (0 dB)
Asus EAH2400PRO HTP 256M graphic adapter (0 dB)
CPU AMD X2 BE-2300 AM2 (45 Watts : the most energy-efficient Desktop CPU available)
DDR2 RAM Crucial 2 x 1G PC6400 800MHz
Seasonic S12II-380 Power Supply 380 Watts (Active PFC, very silent and 85%+ efficiency)
PC case ANTEC SOLO (expensive but good against noise)
Noctua NH-U12F CPU cooler (6 dB)
Noctua NF-S12-1200 case fan (6 dB)
DVD burner PIONEER DVR IDE (Pioneer SATA + AHCI = won't work well)
PRO audio adapter E-MU 0404 PCI
SATA HHDD (Hybrid HardDisk) Samsung 2.5" HM08HHI 80G (one platter = better against noise) 5400rpm 8M cache + 256M Flash (good if vista really uses it...)
Corsair Voyager GT 4 GB (entirely used by readyboost)

With AMD Cool&Quiet active, the CPU runs at 23° Celsius, the GPUs at 33°, the motherboard at 42° and the PC is really silent.

The total price is 750 euros all tax included (in France).

[Thoughts] My Photoshop secret tip for underwater photography post-prod

2007-10-24T19:32:00.000+01:00

The photo as taken with my now very old (but still working) Powershot A70 in its underwater case ($100 on ebay) :

Blurry and lacking some colors, isn't it ?

This is the photoshoped result.

Before...

After...

So you are in Photoshop and you opened your photo (it's called Background by default).

1 - Duplicate current layer (Background)
2 - Auto Levels
3 - Brightness/Contrast : Brightness +50
4 - Duplicate Background
5 - Move current layer to layer 2 (at the top)
6 - Auto Color
7 - Opacity 80%

If the result is too flashy you can play with the Opacity of the two first layers.

Of course you can make this an action script.

Enjoy!

[Thoughts] Br0ken!

2007-10-24T16:08:00.000+01:00

A pedestrian crossed the street and had me fell from my bicycle.

The result is a broken right hand scaphoid bone...

Believe me, it hurts...

More infos about the scaphoid fracture.

I also broke the radius, but this is less of a problem...

I'll get better brakes and tires for my bicycle :)

Btw, the bike ain't broke, it's a decathlon (cocorico).

[Thoughts] From Eudora to Penelope

2007-09-26T07:49:00.000+01:00

Saturday was migration day... from Eudora 7 to Eudora 8 (aka Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 + Penelope extension (made by Eudora developers)).

I have to say this wasn't the nicest migration ever...
First, my Outbox was lost during the conversion (~1 GByte of emails) for an unknown reason and I had to re-import it manually with a converter written in Python.

Then, I have to say Penelope is quite far from Eudora at the moment.
There are some nice features, like an huge speed improvement compared to Eudora 7, but all the GUI is crap compared to the existing Eudora 7.

The nice thing is there are tons of add-ons for Thunderbird which will make it look more like Eudora... and some will make it better for specific tasks or parts.

Here's my add-on list with notations :

+ = nice idea but buggy or incomplete implementation
++ = nice
+++ = really useful and well implemented
++++ = should be included into thunderbird

Dictionary Switcher / to switch between French and English : +++
Header Scroll Extension / to limit the size of the full headers panel : ++++
Maximize Message Pane / to open new messages inside thunderbird's main window : + (not quite as cool as Eudora 7 was)
No New Window on Double Click / to avoid the opening of new windows when you double-click on a folder : + (double-click should take us to that folder)
Penelope / Eudora 8 : +
Quote Colors : to colour threads in e-mails : + (nice but sometimes buggy)
Show Address : to show sender and destination e-mails : +++

[Thoughts] Back from Greece

2007-08-28T20:42:00.000+01:00

Nice holidays in a small Greek island...

(view from our house)

Some photos... HERE

[Netlantis] Routing Table Geoanalysis

2007-07-29T16:36:00.000+01:00

Today is the official launch of my latest (and newest) project, the Routing Table Geoanalysis.

In fact, while I was working on the ASGEO project I received an invitation to participate to a visualization competition, NetSci07, with my (now old) rootzmap project... which I did (though I did not win :)).

This is when came to me the idea of creating Geoanalysis posters... and the Netlantis Routing Table Geoanalysis project was born. Of course, this will be part of the Netlantis project (when it's back), so every peer will have its own RTG poster available for download every month.

ps: Note that the rootzmap project will also be available from Netlantis so peers will be available to generate their own map (which is going to make nice t-shirts for your-favorite-NOG meeting) :)

[SYSCTL] Cable Bandwidth Upgrade

2007-07-20T12:44:00.000+01:00

No need to say that it works better than before (4Mb/s - 256Kb/s).

Yumm, since October, upload has been upgraded to 1Mb/s...

[SYSCTL] Installing VMXnet on Debian Etch (4.0)

2007-07-06T12:10:00.000+01:00

# Getting the right packages if using a netinst (with a 2.6.18-4-686 kernel)
apt-get install linux-kernel-headers linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686 make psmisc gcc

# Creating a symlink so that the vmware script finds everything easily
cd /usr/src && ln -s linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686 linux

# Installing VMWare Tools (no SSH, console only)
./vmware-install.pl
(Answer "no" to the vmhgfs question, so that you won't build it (it's useless in most cases))

# the vmxnet module is compiled...

# Now we're doing what they are telling us to do...
/etc/init.d/networking stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
depmod -a
modprobe vmxnet
Don't /etc/init.d/networking start ... it's useless

# And this is what they are not telling us to do :
Stop the VMWare...
Edit "Other Linux 2.6.x kernel.vmx" (or whatever .vmx you have) :
Add the following line under ethernet0.present = "TRUE" :
ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet"

Reboot the Linux, lspci and lsmod will show you no pcnet32 device, only the vmxnet one.

Enjoy!

[Thoughts] New sound system @ sysctl labs

2007-06-08T16:58:00.000+01:00

I just finished my sound system upgrade, which consisted in getting the new Samson Rubicon 10" sub (mid-end studio monitoring equipment) and two beautiful and really great speakers from Monitor Audio, the RS6.

Here's the whole system :

Even though it's still being running in, it already sounds good and the "Rosenut" RS6' suits better my interior which has red & black for theme.

If you're interested by this setup, here's the components list :
- 1 x Toslink splitter from Velleman (hugh! ... though it's only a switch :))
- 1 x Inter-M (Inkel) R150 Plus
- 1 x Behringer ULTRAMACH PRO SRC 2496
- 1 x Samson Rubicon R10S
- 2 x Monitor Audio Silver RS6
...and it's total price is good for the quality (~1800 euros).

Don't hesitate to give your thoughts on possible improvements to this system :)

The sub + the RS6 replace my Tannoy MX2M's mounted on Atacama Nexus 7 stands, which offered me hours of pleasure and have been sold to a good friend (which tells how much I appreciated these :) ).

[Thoughts] Signal Spam

2007-05-28T14:03:00.000+01:00

First spam sent to Signal Spam...

Well it seems to go in the database, and the site is really fast, which probably means they haven't yet been affected by the slashdot syndrome.

I'm surprised how "geeky" (as opposed to user-friendly) the website looks...

I've read an interesting post about the technical details behind the project : http://www.jgc.org/blog/

Surprisingly, it's MySQL based, we'll see if the database works well after a few million emails sent... My experience says after 20 Million entries or 40 Gb of data, MySQL on a single server tends to be "less usable" :)

[Netlantis] ASGEO coming soon...

2007-05-20T22:50:00.000+01:00

I've just finished the Netlantis routing table geoanalysis poster project :

Poster for AS 13237 (printer-friendly) :

Poster for AS 6730 (screen-friendly) :

Netlantis is now sponsored by MaxMind... they have great (commercial) databases for IP geolocation which are now used for the Poster project and the ASGEO project.

... and since I've finished coding this project, I have time to work on ASGEO.

http://asgeo.netlantis.org/

Expect it to be ready for production by the end of the year.

[SYSCTL] The right way to publish a proxy auto-config file (proxy.pac)

2007-04-25T21:22:00.000+01:00

If you don't know what's a proxy.pac file, you can read this wikipedia entry.

I like proxy.pac files, they allow flexible and efficient proxy configuration in any browser. (I find the WPAD "trick" very ugly... so I've never advised my customers to implement it.)

OK, so you have this proxy.pac file which has to be downloaded from a web server... though if you have a redundant proxy architecture which is based on appliance hardware, with no embedded HTTP server to serve your proxy.pac file, you are introducing a big SPOF in your design. The proxy.pac file needs to be accessible anytime and that won't be accomplished with a single webserver providing it since it will be less reliable than your cluster of proxy servers.

Should you invest in a cheap load balancer and two web servers ? (the rich man's way)
Should you setup a cluster of WRT54G with DRBD and Heartbeat ? (the poor man's way)
Should you revert to using static proxy configuration and exception in the browsers ? (the ugly way)

If your network has an Active Directory or some DFS shares (or alike) [that's 100% of my customers], what you can do is to place your proxy.pac file on this share and use it in your browser so there's no need for a HTTP server cluster.

I'll let the DFS guys figure how to implement it based on the following example :
1 - On a Domain Controller create a folder in your SYSVOL folder like : %SystemRoot%\Sysvol\Sysvol\domain_name\Proxy ;
2 - Put your proxy.pac file in this folder and set proper permissions on it (so only admins can modify it) ;
3 - Modify the script that auto-mounts your network drives to get a new one for the share \\domaine_name\Sysvol\domain_name\Proxy (for example P:) ;
4 - Deploy the proxy.pac with AD (or similar) with the following URL : file://P:\proxy.pac (in fact you can also use file://\\domaine_name\Sysvol\domain_name\Proxy\proxy.pac but I find this a bit ugly :) )

It works like a charm...

Enjoy :)

[SYSCTL] My first post

2007-04-25T20:15:00.001+01:00

OK so here's my blog.

I'm Philippe Bourcier, living in Paris, France where I work as a IT security consultant.

I will post here some geek stuff, some HOW TO's about IT, IT security and Network.

IT and IT security related entries will have [SYSCTL] in their title.
Network related entries will have [Netlantis] in theirs.
Other more personal things might be called [Thoughts].

My personal website is http://www.sysctl.org/