It's like web 2.0, yet far better!

Haven't made a post in awhile, so I'm catching up here.

Just got back from a week-long training session in Atlanta, GA.  It was a pretty good trip overall, and I think I know a thing or two about BGP, now.  A coworker and I took the trip via car, which took around 3:30, or less, I didn't keep track of time too well.  I took a couple photos of the Buckhead area, which is the northern part of Atlanta.  Even though we were far from downtown, traffic was still pretty congested.  Now I can understand the pain of IP packets trying to flow through small pipes.  Lots of traffic lights, too, hmm - those could be interpreted as routers...

During a day off last week, I put up some geeky things in my dining room.  Remember the time when Intel actually made some good processors?

I successfully did a downgrade from FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE to 5.4-RELEASE-p11 on dax last week.  6.0-STABLE kept panicking due to a bug in the fxp driver, which got to be annoying.  The downgrade wasn't too bad, and everything seems to be working properly.  The FreeBSD team says do not do this, but IMO 5.4 -> 6.0 was a trivial upgrade anyway (should have just been 5.5).  The downgrade went something like this:

• Sync sources for RELENG_5_4
• Make world and kernel, reboot
• mergemaster, etc. and reboot
• Manually copy stand back to /
• Remove misc binaries in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin (do a diff between the before and after ls -lR's of /usr)
• Recompile the following ports, if you use them:
  • pftop
  • net-snmp
  • quagga
  • apache
  • perl
  • openssh-portable

If you don't recompile them, prepare for tons of SIG11's and stuff.  Also, don't do this if you don't have at least serial console access, since stuff like OpenSSH might break :)

I've been playing around with NetFlow recently, in my free time.  It's a pretty old protocol, and I'm surprised there aren't more OSS packages that will process it.  I did manage to get FlowScan, CUFlow, and fprobe working together to produce some pretty graphs here, here, and here.  I'll setup the web-based graph generator later.

Picked up two books today at B&N: Understanding the Linux Kernel and OSPF and IS-IS.  Ever since diving into networking (job and all) I feel like I've lost touch with my interest in operating systems, so I figure the kernel book will get me back into that, assuming I even get halfway through it.  The book is around 900 pages.  The OSPF and IS-IS book looks really great, especially since it's authored by Jeff Doyle, who actually stopped by the office last week for a small presentation on IPv6.  I know almost nothing about IS-IS, so hopefully I'll be enlightened.

New comments are currently disabled for this entry.