27 Jun
The Age has an interesting article about proposed DNS changes [1].
Apparently ICANN is going to sell top level DNS names and a prediction has been made that they will cost more than $100,000 each. A suggestion for a potential use of this would be to have cities as top level names (a .paris [...]
Posted in Networking by: etbe
2 Comments
24 Jun
Solving Rubiks Cube by treating disk as RAM: Gene Cooperman gave an interesting talk at Google about how he proved that Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 26 moves and how treating disk as RAM was essential for this. The Google talk is on Youtube [1]. I recommend that you read the ACM [...]
Posted in Networking by: etbe
No Comments
20 Jun
It’s a common practice when hosting email or web space for large numbers of users to group the accounts by the first letter. This is due to performance problems on some filesystems with large directories and due to the fact that often a 16bit signed integer is used for the hard link count so [...]
Posted in Networking by: etbe
3 Comments
05 Jun
In Debian the BIND server will by default append statistics to the file /var/cache/bind/named.stats when the command rndc stats (which seems to be undocumented) is run. The default for RHEL4 seems to be /var/named/chroot/var/named/data/named_stats.txt.
The output will include the time-stamp of the log in the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (see my previous [...]
Posted in Networking by: etbe
2 Comments
03 Jun
Nowadays it seems that most serious mail servers (IE mail servers suitable for running an ISP) use one file per message. In the old days (before about 1996) almost all Internet email was stored in Mbox format [1]. In Mbox you have a large number of messages in a single file, most users [...]
Posted in Mta, Networking by: etbe
17 Comments
16 Aug
In the IP protocol stack the lowest level protocol is ARP (the Address Resolution Protocol). ARP is used to request the Ethernet hardware (MAC) address of the host which owns a particular IP address.
# arping 192.168.0.43
ARPING 192.168.0.43
60 bytes from 00:60:b0:3c:62:6b (192.168.0.43): index=0 time=339.031 usec
60 bytes from 00:60:b0:3c:62:6b (192.168.0.43): index=1 time=12.967 msec
60 bytes from 00:60:b0:3c:62:6b [...]
Posted in Networking by: etbe
2 Comments
14 Aug
After getting Ethernet Bonding working (see my previous post) I tried to get it going with a bridge for Xen.
I used the following in /etc/network/interfaces to configure the bond0 device and to make the Xen bridge device xenbr0 use the bond device:
iface bond0 inet manual
pre-up modprobe bond0
pre-up ifconfig bond0 up
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
[...]
Posted in Networking, Xen by: etbe
7 Comments
13 Aug
I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch - to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if one breaks the system keeps working.
The first thing to do on Debian is to install the package ifenslave-2.6 [...]
Posted in Linux, Networking by: etbe
12 Comments
24 Jul
In a default configuration of Xen there will be a virtual Ethernet device created for each interface which will be associated with a bridge. A previous post documented how to configure a bridge named xenbr0.
The basic configuration of Xen that most people use is to have a single virtual Ethernet port for each Xen [...]
Posted in Linux, Networking, Xen by: etbe
2 Comments
25 Sep
Bonding is one of the terms used to describe multiple Ethernet cables used to form a single virtual network link. This can be done for performance or reliability.
Bonding for performance used to be common when 100baseT was the fastest network technology that was commonly available. In 1999 servers could usually sustain considerably more [...]
Posted in Linux, Networking by: etbe
No Comments