Archive for the ‘Networking’ Category

Broadband … really?

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

How does one define broadband?  Is it all defined around throuput?  Latency?  Between which endpoints?  Using ADSL currently one can expect a local latency of around 30ms to anywhere within SA, and depending on whether you’ve got a SAIX (Fibre) or IS (both Fibre and Satellite) you can expect anything between 300ms and 800ms to international destinations (obviously depending on the exact geographical location and the type/distance of the peerings being used).

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VoIP Load Balancing over PPPoE links

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

I initially wanted to say over DSL, but then realized that that’s not quite appropriate since we’ve just actually completed the naïve approach making use of iBurst.  So on my way back home … I churned some ideas that I’d like to share (And log, before I forget them).  The ideas will build around the IAX/2 protocol as it’s much, much simpler, but the concepts should apply equally to SIP.  Obviously the ideal is to just get a bigger pipe …

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Bridged wireless

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Ok, so I just spent 3 days hunting after a problem with my Linux configuration that turns out to be due to some “wireless expert” that configured a “wireless bridge” between three sites at one of my clients.  They became my client about a week after the quote was accepted and no longer makes any network topology change without consulting with me first (at least, not as far as I know).  Either way … if you want a prime example of why it doesn’t work, read on …

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3G, PINs, prompts and pppd

Monday, November 17th, 2008

A recent post by Quintin, and specifically a few comments regarding 3G made me think The primary advice to users looking to use 3G under Linux is to switch off the PIN on the SIM. Well, I’ve posted before on how to make 3G work … but Quintin’s post challenged me to take it to the next level…

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