Re: Network Performance Testing Equipment

2004-06-18 Thread Jason Dixon
On Jun 18, 2004, at 5:50 PM, Jonathan Slivko wrote:
Hmmm. Netperf usually does the trick for network load testing. At
least thats what we use at work :)
-- Jonathan
On a related note, are there any test suites that measure the 
success/failure rate of TCP connections while measuring throughput?  
For example, pushing 10k TCP sessions and measuring time to complete 
_and_ success rate?  Normally, the httpd benchmark stuff would suffice, 
but it would be ideal to avoid any end-application latency and ensure 
that you're testing the quality of the device (firewall) in between.

--
Jason Dixon, RHCE
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net



Re: What HTTP exploit?

2004-05-31 Thread Jason Dixon
On May 31, 2004, at 12:45 PM, Bob Martin wrote:
 The real irony is that it doesn't bother Apache running on NT :)
 In all fairness, somewhere along the line there was a patch for this. 
All my Apache servers do is put request failed: URI too long in the 
error log. Even without the fix it really wasn't anything more than a 
nuisance. Killing off one child process had no effect on valid 
sessions or the parent process.
This also has no effect on Apache 1.3.28 on OpenBSD 3.4 (-stable), 
other than logging an extremely long request string.  Of course, the 
OpenBSD folks audit/patch their own version of Apache, so it might have 
the patch you mention.

--
Jason Dixon, RHCE
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net



Re: Ad blocking with squid

2004-04-19 Thread Jason Dixon
On Apr 19, 2004, at 4:33 PM, Paul Khavkine wrote:

Anyone doing ad blocking with Squid cache engine out there ?
I'm not sure if this is a kosher question for nanog, but what the hell. 
 Personally, I've been very pleased with Privoxy, especially if you 
don't want or need to install a full-blown proxy like Squid.

--
Jason Dixon, RHCE
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net



Re: Alternative Satellite news feed needed

2003-10-02 Thread Jason Dixon

On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 15:55, Adam Maloney wrote:
  It was extremely nice to take the NNTP load off of our upstream links when
  we first set it up. As I understood it, they were not doing well on binary
  feeds towards the end there though.
 
 I think they ended up filtering posts over a certain length over a year
 ago (?).  They were approaching 45-50MBit/s, and when they implemented
 that filter they cut it back to about 30.  Not exactly a full feed, but
 how much porn do you actually need? :)

I don't want to start speculating on certain issues, but I worked there
between 4/00 and 4/01 as one of the engineers responsible for
maintaining the uplink servers and other satellite doohickeys, so I can
speak factually on certain events and paths we went down.  Although Mike
Donovan or Lisa Peoples would be able to explain much of this better
than yours truly, I'll give it my best shot (as I remember it).

As the Internet grew, NNTP traffic grew exponentially.  Binary
attachments were the bane of our existence, but... so long as we had the
transponder throughput to accomodate our recipe of HTTP/NNTP/AV/etc, we
avoided filtering as long as technically feasible.  Unfortunately, it
quickly became obvious that while NNTP was what was paying the bills
(hypothetically... since too many ISP's were apparently too damn cheap
to pay their bills), it was also choking the 45MB we could fit through
the transponder.

At one point in time, we were trying to push 250-260Gb/day across the
transponder (roughly 22-30Mbps peak, IIRC).  This left very little for
our other products.  When it started to smother the rest, we were
forced to start filtering on incomplete multi-part binaries.  Some of
our clients started bitching (some did from the beginning), as they
would miss the occassional multi-part binary and blame Cidera.  This was
*not* any fault of ours, as we would push out everything we had.  As a
usenet peer, we were victim to incompletes just like anyone else (even
with our excellent range of peer sources... thanks to M.D.).  The only
other type of filtering that might have occurred was throttling on the
uplink.

I have no doubt that things had changed drastically since the day I was
laid off in April '01 (coincidentally, the day our SysEng staff went
from 2 to 1).  NNTP continued to increase, and likely always will. 
Folks like Donovan, Peoples, McGuire, Krokes, Humphrey and the rest did
their damndest to provide a kick-ass product at a fraction of the cost
of conventional terrestrial lines.  I miss that place and the work we
did with a serious passion.  It was just one of those ideas and
opportunities that doesn't come across very often, and I was damn lucky
to be considered a [very] small part of it.  *sigh*

Cheers to the happy fun ball.

-- 
Jason Dixon
Former Systems Engineer
Cidera, Inc.



Re: Paypal off-the-air?

2003-08-29 Thread Jason Dixon

On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 09:45, John Ferriby wrote:
 It seems that PayPal is off-the-air.   We're seeing all connections die via
 uunet and sprint routes.   Anyone know what's going on?

I recall they were going offline from 12:30am to 3:00am Pacific Time for
maintenance.  I'm not seeing any problems with the site right now, from
the east coast.  Traceroutes timeout in San Jose AlterNet (starting on
EC), but http works fine.


-- 
Jason Dixon, RHCE
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net



Re: Server Redundancy

2003-08-14 Thread Jason Dixon

On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 13:39, Allan Liska wrote:
 On 6 Aug 2003, Jason Greenberg wrote:
  
  Can I have some suggestions on how to load balance servers that are on
  seperate IP blocks?  Is there any way to perform translation at this
  level?  Exclude DNS based balancing please...  
  
 
 Take a look at Nortel's Alteon product line, Cisco's CSS product line, or 
 F5's BigIP Product Line.  All of which have Global Server Load Balancing 
 capability.  The GSLB can be done a number of different ways on these 
 boxes including stupid DNS tricks (not your typical round robin stuff, but 
 still DNS) and using a BGP configuration.

I second this suggestion.  I worked briefly at F5 Networks in 2001 and
was responsible for supporting Big-IP and 3DNS.  Both are very nice
products, but NOT cheap.

-J.



Re: Learning more about authentication and passwords

2003-07-29 Thread Jason Dixon

On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 09:37, Dave Israel wrote:
 On 7/29/2003 at 04:37:01 -0400, Sean Donelan said:
  
  If you would like to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses
  of various authentication methods, I highly recommend the book
  
  Authentication: From Passwords to Public Keys
  by Richard E. Smith ISBN: 0201615991
  
 
 I'll add:
 
 Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World
 by Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, Mike Speciner, Charles Kaufman 
 Prentice Hall PTR
 ISBN: 0130460192 
 
 I have not read the 2nd Edition, but the 1st was excellent.

I *have* read the 2nd Edition, and highly recommend it.  Hi Dave.  :)

-J.