Archive for the ‘Networking’ Category

The correlation between network traffic, tea and lunch times

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

So I could for a long time now spot public holidays, weekends, and general stuff on network graphs, but never did I suspect I’d be able to detemine lunch and tea times based on network traffic graphs!  Anyway, check this one out:

VoIP Traffic Graph

VoIP Traffic Graph

One can clearly see the 10:00 tea time, then lunch at 13:00 and tea again at 15:00 before things start quieting down for the weekend at around 16:30.  Surprisingly there is still a decent amount of activity for a saturday :).

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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