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I’ve been experimenting with various operating systems on my Thinkpad and have been trying to get a Unix-like system on there. I’ve played with Ubuntu but the battery life is abysmal. I can get around 3 hours with Windows XP installed and barely half that with Ubuntu 8.10 installed.

Just for grins, I decided to see how difficult it would be to get FreeBSD 7.0 working on this machine. After I was done, I decided I’d share the knowledge:

Here’s how I did it

Filed under: Hardware, Personal Projects, Software, Unix Tags: , 7.0, Centrino, FreeBSD, ipw, laptop, T40, Thinkpad | Post a comment

Two cool articles up on Linuxjournal.com regarding IPTables, the built-in firewall for Linux. I’ve struggled to learn how IPTables works (especially after using the excellent OpenBSD pf firewall) but these videos really explain IPTables well:

Part 1

Part 2

I would encourage you to watch both videos if you use Linux, especially if your system is exposed to the Internet (not behind a home router).

Filed under: Linux, Networking Tags: , firewall, iptables, Linux, netfilter | Post a comment

Finally, after 6 long months of studying for this thing! It was tough and I thought that I had bombed it halfway through. I’ll keep it short: know all the objectives and you’ll pass.

Next up is the CCDP ARCH exam. I’ve passed the CCNP routing and switching exams which are prerequisites for the CCDP so I figured why not just take one more exam and add another certification to my belt? After that’s done I’ll take the MPLS exam and have the CCIP certification. I think I’ll take a break after that…

Filed under: Cisco, Personal Projects Tags: , 642-642, CCIP, cisco certifications, qos exam | Post a comment

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of time left until the election to actually educate people on Barack Hussein Obama’s background and dangerous associates. For some odd reason, the lamestream media has ensured that you the voter will not be allowed to know who this dangerous man is. But here’s a few videos you might like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_N1rqVo2W0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m89m0pC_bpY

This one’s especially good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0LpqaKlZKQ

If this enemy of the United States actually wins (you may have noticed I’m not fond of extreme liberalism), say goodbye to the country you know and love. He will do his damnedest to turn this place into a welfare state where you take orders from the government and have no choice. With him as president, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid running the Legislative branch, you won’t recognize this country in four years.

Filed under: Editorials/Rants, Government, Politics Tags: , barack hussein, democrat socialists, enemy of the state, so long U.S.A | Post a comment

Since subprime mortgage loans will probably mostly go away, it can’t hurt to learn how they work. Here’s a really funny slideshow that does just that:

https://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1

Filed under: Humor Tags: , mortgage mess, subprime mortgages, what free market? | Post a comment

This is interesting (and not surprisingly, not even reported in the mainstream media). Apparently, ol’ Barry Obama is taking any and all contributions, even from other countries. This is illegal according to our Federal Election laws. He apparently has a lot of contributers in Gaza and Palestein. Check out the article here:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/obamas_donor_contributions_sil.html

In sharp contrast, John McCain’s contribution records are squeaky clean. All even dollar amounts (characteristic of contributions in dollars) as opposed to Barack’s donations that have a lot of uneven amounts (like $200.45).  Let’s see if NBC, CBS, or ABC even pick up on this. Think what would happen if it were found that John McCain were receiving illegal foreign contributions…

Filed under: Politics Tags: , 2008 Election, barry obama, Democrats, illegal contributions, mainstream media shield, not the one | 1 Comment

I’m actually very surprised this hasn’t been picked up on any of the major tech sites. Here’s the first sentence from the article:

“The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.”

Wow! This would seem to be a complete reversal of the PTO’s position (patenting world+dog is ok). If true, it could certainly be beneficial for Free and Open Source software, but more importantly, it could restore some much needed creativity and competition to the tech world that now goes to filing, defending, and getting sued over patents.

Full article is here.

Filed under: Government, Politics, Tech News Tags: , patent litigation, software innovation, software patents | Post a comment

With all the recent hubub about ISP traffic management, I figured I’d start an article series on QOS: what it is, how it works, and where it is implemented in a network. After all, my day job is networking so I may as well share some knowledge.

Since the Internet first went commericial in the mid-90s, network traffic has grown significantly (that’s a bit of an understatement really).  These days there is talk of an impending “exaflood” of network traffic - an increase of network bandwidth of epic proportions so high that all Internet traffic becomes jammed. This is little more than a theory at this point; an earlier prediction in the 1990s of a “petaflood” never actually materialized thanks to the dizzying pace of speed increases in computing power both in generic PCs and networking equipment and the phenomenal increases in network bandwidth (in the early 1990s most of the Internet was connected by 45Mbps DS3s; nowadays there are multiple 10Gbps connections between most ISPs).

The most obvious way to manage a network is to implement quality of service. QOS is called both “managed fairness” and “managed unfairness” because it attempts to provide better service for some things while providing worse service for others.

Part 1 of my QOS series lays down the foundation of QOS. Subsequent parts will discuss technologies in more detail.

Read on dear readers and learn the fundimentals of quality of service!

Filed under: Networking Tags: , exaflood, network management, QOS, quality of service, queueing, shaping | Post a comment

So over the past few days, I’ve moved my websites to new hardware. I got a used Sun Enterprise 420r and decided it was time. Pretty nice box: 4 UltraSPARC II processors at 450Mhz each, 1 Gig of RAM, and 72 GB of drive space. Of course it’s running my favorite server operating system - FreeBSD. I considered and even tried to install Solaris 10 but it was being a PITA so I threw my hands up and just downloaded the FreeBSD ISO instead. In the process, I’ve learned how to move a site and minimize the impact of doing so (not that I have a heavily trafficed site anyways). For the curious, my old hardware was a PIII 800 with 512 MB RAM and 160 GB of drive space. If the day ever comes that I need more space I can always pop in another drive. I don’t see that happening soon though.

Filed under: Hardware, Personal Projects, Site News, Unix Tags: , FreeBSD, new hardware, web sites | 2 Comments

I love the Firefox web browser. Even more than Opera. However, Firefox tends to be a memory hog. The reason for this is that once you load a web page and begin viewing it, Firefox begins prefetching the pages that are linked to the page you’re viewing. I can only assume that this is intended to make subsequent pages you click on load faster. This feature would have been great twelve years ago when everyone was on a 56Kbps dial-up modem but in today’s world of multi-megabit broadband it really isn’t needed.

One very undesirable effect prefetching has is to swell the amount of memory Firefox uses. Don’t believe me? Load up four separate web pages in four tabs and leave them idling over the weekend. When you come back, don’t be surprised if you see that the Firefox executable is using nearly 800 Megs of RAM. Yikes!

Even though you’re probably reading this on a quad core Xeon with 4 Gigs of RAM, you may as well disable prefetching so you can put your memory to other use. To do this, first open a new tab or window. Next, in the location bar, type ‘about:config’ (without the quotes). This will bring up a list of internal Firefox preferences. You can tweak many aspects of the browser but we’re interested in disabling prefetching. In the Filter field, type the word fetch. You should see a screen similar to the one below:

Simply double clicking the ‘network.prefetch-next’ value will set it to false (disable prefetching). Restart Firefox and look in amazement at how much less memory it consumes.

Now that it uses less memory, why not make it faster? Try this other tweak here.

Filed under: Software, Tweaks/Hacks Tags: , disable prefetch, firefox memory consumption, hacks, memory hog, tweaks | 1 Comment