After a long time using standard PCs in the home for development I've finally splashed out on a HP DL160 G6.

I've done this because I'm fed up with replacing power supplies, fans and running out of motherboard memory capacity. In my experience the HP rackmount servers (almost) never break down and you can stuff serious amounts of memory into them (the DL160 G6 has 18 SIMM sockets). My server spec is 2 x quad core cpu + 4 x 3.5 inch disks + 40GB RAM. Paid about GBP 1000 for the server (second user) off EBAY then added 32GB RAM. Its a good deal if you compare it with a standard size motherboard which can take that sort of memory and a pair of CPUs and you add in the cost of a good case and power supply.

With a good server you can concentrate on virtulisation and your testing and be not forever repairing things. Quality always pays off in the long term.

Andy

Wonder how many operators of TOR exit nodes will be getting a visit.

There is no way the wallet will disappear until there is a universal service obligation on Paypal and other means of payment. Such an obligation will heavily penalise electronic payment providers if they withdraw service from specific users or their networks fail to deliver a reliable service.

Cash is reliable - that is why people use it. Nobody can stop me using cash to get things I need. Look what has happened to Wikileaks when certain US Governement people had a chat with Visa and Mastercard.

E-Cash might be a way around the control issue. BitCoin is interesting but has a few issues with scaling and anonymity - its pretty good though. The next iterations of E-Cash will draw heavily on the techniques of BitCoin and I'm sure will avoid a lot of the issues.

Andy

Most delays are due to users connecting to their ADSL modem via Ethernet and not traffic managing properly.

On a congested link this can cause large delays as Ethernet normally has a 1000 packet buffer in the Linux kernel and the ADSL modem has a similar buffer. You only need a couple of heavy connections which want to go faster than the ADSL will support and those buffers start to fill up real fast. You can easily end up with latencies measured in seconds if you have a lot of connections running (say bittorrent).

There are several solutions to this but the best in my experience is to change the queuing discipline to SFQ and rate limit using HTB. This has been in the kernel for years and works extremely well. You need to limit the traffic upstream and downstream to slightly less (5% less) than the ADSL link speed. This ensures that the modem never queues traffic. Uplink you can use all sorts of fancy queuing but downlink all you can really do is policing of traffic unless you install the IMQ patch to the kernel.

I've a script which I got from somewhere a while ago, don't remember where though. I've put it at http://ams1.x31.com/~andy/ppp0-ratelimit.sh if anyone wants to look at it. It expects to work on ppp0 but can be adapted as required.

I've played a lot more recently with Linux kernel disciplines and it has produced surprising performance on congested links. One link is running mail, remote access and Internet access over a 1mbit symmetric link for about 60 users. in the morning it hits 95% link capacity at the start of work and stays there until everyone goes home but ssh sessions are fully interactive without noticeable lag all this time. Yes web browsing is a little slow but it is the same for everyone and one user can't flood the link and upset everyone else.

Linux QOS is the future, pity about the documentation

What the USA makes its ISPs do is an internal matter. Pressuring registrars to kill domains is another. Grey market and fake pharmaceuticals is one thing but when you get into matters of opinion and national ethics then it is something completely different. At least ICANN stayed away, however they are still under the influence of the USA courts and the Whitehouse - look at the farce about the XXX TLD.

I'm not a great fan of the ITU as it is slow and cumbersome but I do feel that ICANN, IANA and the rest should be moved under their control. The Internet doesn't belong to any single country regardless of who came up with the original protocols. This is preferable to having multiple organisations running different root servers which can lead to the same URL being resolved to different IP addresses.

Andy
Doha, Qatar

I've had a freecom Internet Radio[1] for about 2 years now which cost about $100 (GBP 60).

Its a flexible unit with WLAN, Ethernet etc.

Andy

[1] http://www.freecom.com/product.asp?CatID=1148017

Its possible the retroactive parts of these changes are in breach of UK/EU data protection laws. The issue is that a holder of personal data may only use information for the purposes for which it was provided. If the person supplying the data wished to keep it relatively private and Facebook then later make it public without the informed prior consent of the user then there is a probable breach of the regulations.

Of course Facebook will say that they are not based in the EU but they probably do have servers and interests there and gain revenue from EU based advertisers.

rocamargo writes
"I've been thinking a lot lately about the end of the Space Shuttle. For someone my age, the shuttle really *IS* space travel. I'm going to be really sad to see STS-133 land."

I suspect the crew will be really happy to see STS-133 land! :-)

Consider:

1. If the person in charge of the incident considered the 'object' a security risk why did they wait almost an hour before getting everyone off the plane after it landed? A fire in that environment would almost certainly resulted in people being killed or injured. Thats what the emergency exits are for.

2. If the person in charge of the incident considered the 'object' to be of no risk then they should have parked at a normal gate and deplaned as normal. The possible charge of vandalism (blocking the toilet with an iPod) does not even remotely justify the impact on the other passengers.

There is no middle ground in this decision process.

What I suspect happened is that the pilot decided that there was no risk to the passengers once he landed as he had been satisfied as to the object in the toilet at this point. Unfortunately the ground commander didn't want to accept the pilots asscessment and decided to continue as 'planned'. This does raise the question as to who was in charge.

All in all a complete fsck up and farce.