Author: otmar

Categories
System Administration

A lesson in software licenses

Just a quick remark: a “aptitude install ddd” showed that this package depended on lesstif2 which is an Open Source re-implementation of the Motif GUI library.

Most of the reader here will never have heard about Motif.

Back when I started working with X, there were two competing GUI standards: OpenLook and Motif. Free Software (the term Open Source wasn’t invented yet) stuck to the basic Athena Widgets or (later) used Tk. Despite the strict licensing scheme of Motif some projects (e.g. the original Mosaic Browser) went with Motif nevertheless — motivating the Lesstif project.

It could have owned the Unix GUI market, but it wasn’t compatible with free software, so it lost the battle for developer mindshare and fell into obscurity. Qt almost made the same mistake, but they were a bit more liberal in the beginning and as GTK took off, they had to open up even more to stay relevant.

In other words, the decision not to support free software with Motif killed it.

Categories
CERT Internet Pet Peeves

Da hat wer was falsch verstanden

Laut FuZo baut die Türkei ein Zentrum für IP-Verfolgung. Gut für sie.

Aber könnten die bitte statt Zensur für die eigene Bevölkerung was zum Schutz des restlichen Internets vor Spam und script-kiddies mit Testosteron-Überproduktion aus dem türkischen Internet tun?

Danke.

Categories
Internet

/dev/otmar is now IPv6-enabled

At work, we’ve been running IPv6 for a while and back home I’ve also got v6 on my DSL connection (not native, though, silverserver implemented that with a tunnel). My root-server also got v6 connectivity via a Tunnel from the nic.at network (easy enough to do if you’re the router-admin :-), but I never used that for serious stuff.

Now that Hetzner finally provides native IPv6 connectivity, I made the necessary changes to the configuration of my server and now this blog is reachable via IPv6, too.

Next task: Get cacti to graph how many visitors use v4 versus v6.

Categories
Internet

The effect of soccer on the IXPs

This years soccer Word Cup seems to be the first one for which streaming video is widely available on the Internet. The Austrian public TV (ORF) is offering a decent livestream (or in the case of parallel games, two streams). So what do the public traffic statistics of the Internet Exchange Points show?

This graph is from the Vienna Internet Exchange. Some notable points:

  • Gametime means traffic-peaks. The World Cup schedule is clearly visible in the graphs. Up to the 21th, there were three games per day, two close after each other, then a two hour break and then another game. Starting with the 22nd, there were four games a day, with two running in parallel. (the times in the graph are UTC!)
  • Weekend have smaller spikes than workdays: On the 19th and 20th, the games are less visible than on the other days. It looks like watching the stream over the Internet is more popular in offices than at home. This makes sense as at home the TV screen is most likely the better place to watch soccer.
  • Regarding traffic levels: from looking at the graphs, the biggest spikes seem to be around 8 Gbit/s. Assuming that this is mostly ORF streams for the Austrian public, one can assume that ORF/APA is pushing more than 10 Gbit/s during Word Cup games.
Categories
Tracks

Tracks: Jonas edition

This weekend I was babysitting at my sister’s place. They have quite an impressing collection of wooden tracks, so I built the following with Jonas, her 5yr old son.

Categories
Internet

Talking about DNSSEC

The Austrian ISP Association (ISPA) had asked me to hold a workshop on DNSSEC as part of their “ISPA Academy” series of events. And as they had complaints that all their events are in Vienna, I agreed to hold it in Salzburg, where I had logistical support from the nic.at headquarter.

I thus spent the Wednesday traveling to Salzburg (actually: I’m usually quite productive in trains, and a good part of the presentation was prepared on the way in), then holding the workshop and riding the train back. Six hours of train for 4 hours of workshop isn’t that bad.

If anyone is interested, here are my slides. My aim was to explain the motivation for DNSSEC, the technical implementation and, most importantly, what introducing DNSSEC means for an ISP. I only touched very briefly on the commercial aspect.

In the end, this room full of techies were not exactly cheering for the adoption of dnssec.

Postscript: Just two days later, we have this: doc.gov, the entity that still has a hand in approving changes to the root zone, messed up their DNSSEC signatures. From http://dnsviz.net/d/doc.gov/dnssec/:

Categories
Tracks

Tracks: Clemens

More and more, Clemens builds tracks by himself. Up until recently, they consisted only of long stretches and hardly ever formed closed loops.

This is starting to change, below is what he managed to build yesterday:

Categories
System Administration

Dear Cisco

I’m doing a bit of network monitoring with SNMP again, and stumbled upon yet another cisco SNMP bug. Back when I wrote the pan-european NMS for KPNQwest, I had to work-around a good number of bugs in the IOS snmp agent, but this time it’s a bug in the MIB file:

Using the CISCO-BGP4-MIB, I can graph the state of my BGP peerings. All fine, when looking at


    CbgpPeerAddrFamilyPrefixEntry ::= SEQUENCE {
        cbgpPeerAcceptedPrefixes        Counter32,
        cbgpPeerDeniedPrefixes          Gauge32,
        cbgpPeerPrefixAdminLimit        Unsigned32,
        cbgpPeerPrefixThreshold         Unsigned32,
        cbgpPeerPrefixClearThreshold    Unsigned32,
        cbgpPeerAdvertisedPrefixes      Gauge32,
        cbgpPeerSuppressedPrefixes      Gauge32,
        cbgpPeerWithdrawnPrefixes       Gauge32
        }

you notice that the Gauge32 vs. Counter32 types are mixed up.

cbgpPeerAcceptedPrefixes is the only Gauge here, whereas cbgpPeerDeniedPrefixes, cbgpPeerAdvertisedPrefixes, cbgpPeerSuppressedPrefixes and cbgpPeerWithdrawnPrefixes are actually Counters, e.g.


    cbgpPeerWithdrawnPrefixes  OBJECT-TYPE
        SYNTAX      Gauge32
        MAX-ACCESS  read-only
        STATUS      current
        DESCRIPTION
                "This counter is incremented when a route prefix,
                 which belongs to an address family, is withdrawn on
                 this connection. It is initialized to zero when the
                 connection is undergone a hard reset."
        ::= { cbgpPeerAddrFamilyPrefixEntry 8 }
Categories
Life

A Sunday Trip

After taking the kids to the election place we drove to Sparbach Park for a nice Sunday’s excursion:

Elena in the Sand Pit

The promised Ice

Am Spielplatz

Categories
Life

Tired kids

This saturday we finally ordered the new bed for the kids (roughly like the third one from here, had lunch at Kika (not advisable: why the f* is the non-smoking area of the restaurant not next to the playground?)) and when driving home the kids fell asleep in the car:

Elena:

Elena

Clemens:

Clemens