Archive for the ‘Networking/Internet’ Category

Tab Sweep - March 2008

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

Illegal downloading
It seems like March has clearly become a dark time for illegal downloaders. With Exetel in Australia willing to disconnect offenders, following on what seems to have started on in Japan and Sweden (where the ISPs can give to the courts, information on suspected file sharers). The United Kingdom is not far off. Encrypted P2P would seem like the way to go, along with port randomisation, and maybe even using tunnels?

Bloggers to pay a more important role in Malaysia?
It seems that the newly appointed information minister, Ahmad Shabery Cheek, wants to have a meeting with bloggers, as they play a role in nation building! They surely played a role in brining down the coalition. The important thing is that they’ve realised that they, the government of the day, will not control bloggers. Nothing to realise really, that’s what the MSC Bill of Guarantees provides: “7. Ensure no Internet censorship.”

Zimbra, and quality
Upgrading Zimbra has scared me in the past. This time, another problem cropped up with the ill-fated 5.0.3 release, which was pulled almost immediately. Good thing 5.0.4 has also been released. I cannot wait to have “online backup” in the open source version.

Bloggers feel more connected?
Recent research in Melbourne show that bloggers feel happier and more satisfied with their friends. Swinburne University studied new bloggers, and found that within two months, bloggers felt more socially connected, and generally felt part of a community. However, its not all bells and whistles – bloggers might also be more psychologically distressed? Or maybe, they’re just MySpace bloggers ;)

You weren’t meant to have a boss
Paul Graham tells us that having a boss, isn’t the natural scheme of things. Reading the sub-heading, on Trees, definitely makes a lot of sense. A bold statement, yet true: “You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.” I can already say I can feel myself resonating with it. As always, a good piece of advice: “A lot of people in their early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school. At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be zero rather than negative.”

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

How do you check the speed of your Ethernet card?

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

It has been a very long time since I looked at the LPI (training, courseware, materials, exams), and I don’t remember if this is even covered in LPI 101/102 (and I have no idea about Level 2 or 3, I’m only Level 1 compliant, and even then, back in the Red Hat 7.2 study days :P). Either way, I hope this note is useful. So, how do you check (or change) the speed of your Ethernet card?

Quite simply, with the help of ethtool. Some might be saying, why not mii-tool - well, its because mii-tool is now obsolete, though you pretty much have it on all your Linux distributions. Why? Because it comes as part of net-tools, which also provides other useful tools like netstat, route, ifconfig, arp and many more. If you don’t have ethtool installed, its available in a package, aptly titled, ethtool.

Usage is simple: ethtool eth0. Replacing eth0 with whatever your interface is, is fine. You should now be able to see the speed of your link, and if you were for instance changing it, you might do ethtool -s eth0 speed 10 duplex half or something similar (read the man page, its really helpful).

Me? I just wanted to see if I connected myself to a 100mbps switch or a 10mbps switch and was too lazy to look at the wiring closet ;)

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

When OpenDNS is unreachable

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

Beware, whom you trust your DNS to. I have particularly enjoyed using OpenDNS, mainly because I travel a lot, and encounter a lot of broken DNS configurations. However, when OpenDNS goes wonky, it makes you really wonder if running local DNS makes more sense.

[-(byte@hermione)-(pts/1)-(11:57pm:27/02/2008)-]
[-(~)> ping www.google.com
PING google.navigation.opendns.com (208.67.219.231) 56(84) bytes of data.

— google.navigation.opendns.com ping statistics —
7 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 6000ms

Clearly, not good? Quick edit of /etc/resolv.conf, and I’m quite happy to use local DNS. Oops, it seems like OpenDNS is clearly down now (can’t even reach opendns.com). Ironically, only from my Unwired Internet account.

The difference in traceroute output (for status.opendns.com):
12 38.104.140.46 (38.104.140.46) 261.618 ms 267.483 ms 268.207 ms
13 208.67.219.60 (208.67.219.60) 220.762 ms 220.735 ms 220.709 ms

From hop 12, to hop 13, it is unreachable. Let’s hope this temporary problem, disappears.

Update: Its back online, 1.45am.

Technorati Tags: , , ,