- Roundtable - muug.ca

Home Automation
by Don R. Wolfe 01 May '10

01 May '10

Well we meet again, we need to talk serious motor control as princess auto surplus is waiting. Who in Winnipeg has good knowledge of motor control, microprocessors, bridge motor control either professionally or a great hobbyist. Need a mentor. Thanks The Automator DRWolfe

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How-To: Grep Tricks for Linux Users | ITworld
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 29 Apr '10

29 Apr '10

Further to my RTFM presentation on "grep" at the April MUUG meeting, the following IT World article has a few interesting tips on using GNU grep: http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/106032/how-to-grep-tricks-linu… Note that the article refers to grep for Linux users, but the options described are applicable to the GNU implementation of grep, regardless of underlying OS. GNU grep also has many other potentially useful options, so be sure to RTFM: grep(1). -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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Fwd: Reminder: USENIX OSDI Submission Deadline is May 7
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 26 Apr '10

26 Apr '10

FYI... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Reminder: USENIX OSDI Submission Deadline is May 7 Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:34:59 -0700 From: Lionel Garth Jones <lgj(a)usenix.org> To: info(a)muug.mb.ca, gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca We're writing to remind you that the submission deadline for the 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '10) is approaching. Please submit your work by Friday, May 7, 2010, 9:00 p.m. PDT. Please note: The page limit for submissions is 12 pages not including references. http://www.usenix.org/osdi10/cfpb/ OSDI brings together professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds in what has become a premier forum for discussing the design, implementation, and implications of systems software. The OSDI Symposium emphasizes innovative research as well as quantified or insightful experiences in systems design and implementation. OSDI takes a broad view of the systems area and solicits contributions from many fields of systems practice, including, but not limited to: * Operating systems * File and storage systems * Distributed systems * Mobile systems * Secure systems * Embedded systems * Virtualization * Networking as it relates to operating systems * The interaction of hardware and software development We particularly encourage contributions containing highly original ideas, new approaches, and/or groundbreaking results. Submissions will be judged on originality, significance, interest, clarity, relevance, and correctness. Accepted papers will be shepherded through an editorial review process by a member of the program committee. For more details on the submission process, please see the complete Call for Papers at: http://www.usenix.org/osdi10/cfpb/ We look forward to receiving your submissions! Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison Brad Chen, Google, Inc. OSDI '10 Program Co-Chairs osdi10chairs(a)usenix.org --------------------------------- Call for Papers 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation October 4-6, 2010 Vancouver, BC, Canada http://www.usenix.org/osdi10/cfpb/ Submissions Deadline: May 7, 2010 Sponsored by USENIX in cooperation with ACM SIGOPS ---------------------------------

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Re: [RndTbl] NIC performance with iperf
by Adam Thompson 18 Apr '10

18 Apr '10

Supposedly, although much of it got rewritten around the WS2003R2 era to accommodate full hardware TOE devices. AFAIK, the last MS OS to run anything obviously BSDish was NT4.0. And of course the BSD stack was never meant for 100mbps, never mind gigabit speeds. -Adam

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NIC performance with iperf
by Adam Thompson 18 Apr '10

18 Apr '10

FYI. Windows networking sucks, across all versions of Windows. (At least, at Gigabit speeds, it does.) Between my Windows 7 PC (3.06Ghz HT Pentium 4, Intel PRO 1000/MT Desktop Adapter [82540EM]) and Gentoo Linux server (2 x 2.2GHz Xeon [P4 core], PCI-X [64-bit,66Mhz] Intel PRO 1000/MT Dual-Port Server Adapter [82546EB]) Using "iperf -s" and "iperf -c 192.168.x.x", I get - consistently - between 238Mbps and 250Mbps **in both directions**. Interesting to note is that the Windows 7 PC is CPU-limited on both sending and receiving, despite having all the offload and acceleration features turned on. Simultaneously, the Gentoo box sees a spike on one CPU... to 1%. In UDP traffic, however, I see a startling asymmetry: PC-to-Linux can only send UDP at ~50Mbps, Linux-to-PC sends UDP at ~475Mbps. WTF? I also tried the Parallel option, which runs multiple streams in parallel. Results are consistent, aggregate bandwidth is still only about 260Mbps. Two streams pegs both logical (HT) CPUs on the client at ~95% utilization. I tried enabling and disabling both the Windows Firewall and my AV software, which made essentially no difference at all. Then I also tried running the same set of tests from a Windows 2003 R2 server (2 x 2.13GHz Athlon MP, PCI-X [64-bit,66Mhz] Broadcom NetXtreme [BCM57xx]) N.B. this is the same model of motherboard Kevin is using in his Linux server. and observed slightly better throughput to the Linux server: about 380Mbps. Still better was Linux-to-W2K3R2, at about 440Mbps. UDP performance was similar to Kevin's results, at 103Mbps W2K3-to-Linux & 950Mbps Linux-to-W2K3. CPU utilization on the W2K3R2 box exhibited similar properties as the Win7 client, although none of the tests actually managed to max out either CPU, instead peaking at about 70% utilization. Just for kicks, I ran a test between a RHEL5 VM (under VMWare ESXi 4.0U1, VMXNET adapter) and my Linux server... 920+ Mbps every time! Of course, that number may be suspect since the UDP test reports speeds of 45.3Gbps :-). Conclusion: the culprit is the Windows networking stack. Note that W2K3R2 is supposed to support zero-copy TCP offload, theoretically allowing network communications at wirespeed with extremely low latency. So much for that idea... -Adam Thompson <athompso(a)athompso.net> (204) 291-7950

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printing from an iPad to an HP printer
by Adam Thompson 16 Apr '10

16 Apr '10

It appears that Apple has developed, in conjunction with HP, entirely new printing technology for iPad applications. http://www.theformgroup.com/about/blog/2010/04/how-to-print-from-an-ipad :-) -Adam Thompson <athompso(a)athompso.net> (204) 291-7950

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Re: [RndTbl] Multiple simultaneous SSH connections
by Adam Thompson 16 Apr '10

16 Apr '10

'twas I who needed a solution. The problem with cfengine (and possibly puppet?) is that I cannot install any software on the target servers and have to keep my on-system footprint to an absolute minimum. I do, however, have one server of my own (so to speak) in the network that I can use for non-invasive monitoring, which can include running commands remotely via SSH. -Adam

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squid caching of Windblows Updates
by Trevor Cordes 16 Apr '10

16 Apr '10

As discussed at the Apr meeting, here is my solution for having squid cache your Windblows (XP, mainly but should work for Vista/7) updates downloads. I have just verified this is still working at all my customer sites by looking at the squid access logs and seeing HITs for the big CAB files from windowsupdate.com. This confirms what I have always been seeing while manually doing updates. The magic line you require in your squid.conf is: refresh_pattern http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/ 0 80% 525600 reload-into-ims (no wrapping on the above line) If someone wants my entire squid.conf, let me know. It's setup for a pretty common case where you want to squid all of your internal (192.168.*) computers. The only other major thing is make sure you have a pretty big squid cache and max object size. I recommend at least 3GB. If you have tons of disk, make it 50G or something. More never hurts. I use: cache_swap_low 94 cache_swap_high 97 maximum_object_size 800000 KB Which should nicely handle the Win Update case we're trying to achieve. Now, to make it so you don't have to configure ANYTHING on a stock WinXP box to make it use squid: Make a file on your web server's document root (ie: /var/www/html or similar) called wpad.dat. Make it world readable. Populate it thusly: <? header("Content-type: application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig"); ?> function FindProxyForURL(url, host) { if ( isPlainHostName(host) || dnsDomainIs (host,"tecnopolis.ca") || dnsDomainIs (host,"nocachingdomain.whatever") || shExpMatch (host,"192.168.*") || shExpMatch (url ,"*windowsupdate.microsoft.com/*.js*") || shExpMatch(url ,"*windowsupdate.microsoft.com/*.asp*") ) return "DIRECT"; if (url.substring(0, 5) == "http:" || url.substring(0, 4) == "ftp:" || url.substring(0, 7) == "gopher:") return "PROXY 192.168.1.1:8080; DIRECT"; return "DIRECT"; } Tweak the DIRECT domain/IP exclusions in the first if set. Change the 192.168.1.1 to your squid server's IP. Change the 8080 to whatever port you want to have squid listen to. There's a more standard default port, but I use 8080 as that's what Shaw used when I signed up ages ago and it's easy to remember :-) You also require some funky apache config to make it work: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName wpad.tecnopolis.ca ServerAlias wpad DocumentRoot /var/www/html Alias /wpad.dat /var/www/html/wpad.dat </VirtualHost> (may be a bit redundant, but I am editing my slightly more complex setup to be usable by others) Note, wpad.dat only applies to IE (Internet Exploder) to make Nutscrape-based browsers (Fireflax) you need to make another identical file (hardlink?) called proxy.pac and do some more funky apache stuff: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName proxy.tecnopolis.ca ServerAlias proxy DocumentRoot /var/www/html Alias /wpad.dat /var/www/html/wpad.dat Alias / /var/www/html/proxy.pac </VirtualHost> More redundancy, but trust me, getting this stuff to work is mystical voodoo so cover all your bases. AND, obviously add proxy and wpad as CNAMEs in your DNS server's config! They must resolve to your web server's IP. Lastly, XP by default has the "autodetect proxy settings" enabled in IE, so you literally have to do nothing to have your entire network magically start using the proxy. If it doesn't seem to be working, double-check that IE indeed has that option enabled (Tools, connections, lan settings). Like I said, it's been 10 years since I set this up and last looked it it, so hopefully I'm not overlooking some important point. It literally has worked all these years without tweaking on dozens of servers. 3 cheers for UN*X and it's stability of configuration and migration!

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Re: [RndTbl] squid caching of Windblows Updates
by Adam Thompson 15 Apr '10

15 Apr '10

IIRC the DHCP option works for OS X.

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Network performance tuning
by Kevin McGregor 15 Apr '10

15 Apr '10

I've been trying to narrow down where my performance bottleneck(s) is (are). I just ran "iperf" from a Windows PC (XP SP3) to my Ubuntu 9.10 server. With iperf in "server" mode on the PC, and the client running on the Ubuntu machine, I get 0.0-60.0 sec 4.23 GBytes 606 Mbits/sec Reversed (iperf "server" running on Ubuntu server, client running on the PC), I get 0.0-60.0 sec 1.13 GBytes 162 Mbits/sec Wha...?? Both client and server runs on the PC report TCP window size to be 8 KB, but the Linux client reports 22.4 KB and the Linux server reports 85.3 KB. Increasing that to 256K on both ends has little effect. Does anyone have any suggestions? The Windows NIC is a Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet; the Ubuntu server is using the Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 01). Time to replace a NIC or two? Kevin

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