Here it is again!
It’s System Administrator (or SysAdmin) day 2009 – today. So grab a bottle of beer (or better a 6-pack) and head to your IT department, give the man a bottle of ale, have a chat – let him feel like a friend, not just a login on your screen.
Virtualisation is coming more and more into our lives.
Right now I’m setting up a “jail” XP virtual machine to install a stubborn application there (that doesn’t work with Vista and is sometimes affected by patches, so it needs a special treatment) and playing around with XP Mode in Windows 7 RC on my laptop. At the same time, I have another virtual machine opened, where I’m connected through Citrix client to a remote access machine at work, which is, guess what, just a virtual box running on some access farm.
I know it’s a bit geeky, but wait 3-4 years and you’ll see the same amount of virtualisation in regular people’s lives.
I’m using Linksys WRT54GL as my home WiFi controller – connecting 3 desktops and 4 mobile devices (2 laptops, a Tablet PC and a Pocket PC) to the Internet and between each other.
Recently, a new housemate has moved in – an old friend of mine. He’s a heavy P2P user, downloading hundreds of files at the same time thorugh eMule. I, as an old eMule user, have configured his client to be perfectly fit to our broadband connection. However, we started seeing huge lags on other machines. I cut down the upload speed on eMule, but – surprisingly – it did not help. Neither did cutting down the total connection limit (AKA hard limit).
I sat down and started thinking. There must be a limit somewhere, but it’s not that (like with El Cheapo routers) it’s just getting too many packets and cannot handle them, because cutting down the transfer speed didn’t help. So – what else is there in router that can overflow? NAT table! Could it be?
I googled a bit and it turned out that WRT54GL has very small NAT table – like 512 entries. It seemed it’s a bit too small for 3 people actively using the Internet, plus eMule running in the background. I found a third party firmware for the router – Tarifa. It’s open source, free, easy to install and has the same configuration GUI as the original Linksys firmware.
I tried it and – voila – everything works smooth now. I can change the upload speed of eMule as I wish and it won’t block my network. So, if you have similar problems, give the Tarifa software a try.
OK, I know it might be kind of flimsy, but I just have to post it – for Amiga, for Eric and all the good ol’ days.
OK, I know all of you heard this once or twice. Or even said that sometimes, maybe to cover up some bug, maybe because it was true. But I think there should be some border, after which you don’t say that maic phrase anymore. The “IT-guy” inside you (AKA conscience in the real world) should start screaming that this is not right. And that it went too far. But he didn’t, at least for the ones designing and supporting FireWire.
See – FireWire allows DMA from one device to another. Which of course can be used to do some bad things, like bypassing authentication or getting BIOS passwords. Which was reported to Microsoft 2 years ago (other OSes are affected too, but it’s always better seen to bash Microsoft than Open Source). Who, in turn, said the famous words “It’s a feature, it’s not a bug” and did nothing.
Well… when you can just unlock a working desktop without a password, I would say this is far behind the border. I would feel this in my guts. But the Microsoft guys must be thick-skined.
Recent Comments