Ubuntu usually does things right, but this time they screwed up. They moved my buttons. It is worse than Windoze, which changes the UI every release (every 2 years), because my UI is changing every 6 months.

STOP CHANGING MY USER INTERFACE YOU RAT FINKS!!!

I installed Lucid Lynx a while back because I wasn't happy with Karmic. And as they are getting closer to the release, they changed all their art. And themes. AND MY BUTTONS. I logged back in after an upgrade and found all my buttons on the left of my window instead of the right. After some digging, apparently this is a configurable thing, but unless you have set it, they changed the defaults.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8963718

That tells how to change your order. I prefer gconf-editor because messing with the registry via a command line never works for me. Note that for right-sided icons you want the ":" before all the icon names, not after.

Recently I had the opportunity to work with a customer that needed some help with traffic shaping and policing on their network. I had poked around in the past with this, trying to get guaranteed bandwidth for my VoIP phone, but the last time I checked, that setup no longer worked, so it was shelved until further notice. I just had to take care that when I was on the phone, I could not do any large downloads that would rob the bandwidth from my voice packets.

The customer gave me impetus to re-learn Linux Traffic Control. The main tool offered to us is called tc, meaning traffic control. You can learn all about tc at the Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control website. I spent several hours there trying to remember all I had forgotten. I also looked around at several other websites with howtos on the matter, but it seemed that they were all pointing back to lartc.org anyway. I poked around long enough to understand the recipes in their cookbook and then wrote up a script of my own.

I wanted to have about 90kb/s of guaranteed bandwidth for VoIP and then some other high priority bandwidth for things like ICMP packets, TCP ACK packets, and other low-latency stuff (things that mark the TOS field in the IP header.) In other words, I wanted to be able to:

1. Make sure my VoIP traffic gets through so I don't have choppy phone calls
2. Perform uploads without killing my downloads (let the ACK packets through)
3. Be able to type in an SSH session while doing a large download
4. Not starve my VPN to work when the network is busy (no more 3-12 second latencies, please.)
5. Have fast ping times so I can brag to all my friends

Sounds like I am hoping for a miracle, right? Well, not really. Simply dividing the traffic into several classes and then giving each one a slice of the pie will do a lot on my quest for the Well Tempered Network. I know the VoIP bandwidth, so that is easy. Then the rest, I decided to split into quarters -- high priority gets at least 1/4 of the remaining bandwidth, medium priority gets the same, while bulk transfers and the rest of the stuff get anything that is left over (a little less than 1/2 the pipe).

Without this QoS script, I am unable to do a large download (or upload) without killing my VoIP call, uploads kill downloads, ssh is very non-interactive, and pings range in the 400-1100ms range. With this QoS script, I can do simultaneous large downloads and large uploads without hurting my VoIP call quality AND at the same time, ssh interactivity goes up (to the same as with no other traffic) and ping times range in the 80-200ms range. VPN traffic seems to be better too, though sometimes it suffers from latencies beyond my control. I think this means I reached all my goals. I was very happy with it and thought it might be nice to share.

I was so happy to learn that the 2.6.26 kernel had a free as in speech alternative to the madwifi Atheros driver, ath5k. I have not been so happy that it has been crashing my machine periodically. Since diagnosis of a hung machine without a serial console that is running X is nigh on impossible, I had no choice but to fold and go back to madwifi. However, since then, I have moved on to 2.6.27, which has some changes to two wireless APIs, causing the madwifi driver to fail to build. I wanted to leave my desk with its hard-wired connection but didn't want my machine to hang again.

As one of the free swag items that they handed out at the Linux Plumbers Conference, I received an Intel branded 1GB USB flash drive. Unless you are blind, it would have been impossible to notice the BRIGHT red, green and blue blinking LED that was activated any time the device was plugged in. If I was susceptible to epileptic fits, I am sure it would have caused a seizure. Anyway, not being one to tolerate annoying behavior from electronic devices, I decided to fix it. I popped it open at the seam to find that it came apart very nicely, without breaking anything.

In my five years at IBM I have not gone to a real Linux conference. I admit I am partially to blame. I keep telling myself that I will try harder to work on something cool so I can publish it and go to a conference, but I am not really one of the geeks that must be heard. In other words, I have an opinion, but you will most likely have to ask for it.

For the past three years, Sith has been the trusty server that this website and many of my other services have resided on. Over the past year, he has been showing signs of age. It has certainly been nice to have a server that I could administrate and do just about anything with. While having absolute power over the box was very nice, it was getting to the point that it was not worth the trouble of needing to fix all the problems. Let's face it, I always get lost when I go downtown and this is one less reason to get lost.

I noticed that one of my friends had a link that said hosted by Site5. So I went to check it out. I have been looking at virtual server plans for quite some time. Most plans were at the price where I would end up sharing the virtual host three ways just like I had been sharing my real server for the same price. Disk space was really at a premium for almost all of these plans. With Sith I had 8 GB of space all to myself. If I shared three ways, that would be at least 24 GB (unless we wanted more space) at which point almost all the virtual server plans were out of my price range. I had completely discounted hosting plans because I didn't think they could do what I wanted them to do. Well, it turns out that most really don't, but Site5 does. As I looked through the features they had listed, I was very impressed. So I made a list of things I use Sith for.

I spent too much time today playing with IPv6 stuff that I didn't have any time to work on my latest time sink, Pyrobox. I will have to write about that some other time.

For now, I wanted to get this out there. I was curious about how easy it was to confirm that a string is a valid IPv6 address. It turns out that it is not so simple, thanks to the "space saving" techniques of zero folding that is used. Here are some examples of IPv6 addresses that are valid:

::                           unspecified address
::1                          localhost
fe80::219:7eff:fe46:6c42     link local address
::00:192.168.10.184          embedded IPv4 address

Yes, those are just some of the variety that was introduced that makes the protocol easier to use from a high level, but harder to implement and use from a low level.

I have long been slightly jealous of Darren's MythTV setup. I kept telling myself that I have enough other projects (a.k.a. kids) to keep myself busy for the next 18 years. Plus, the VCR and TV have always been fine for our needs and up until about a month ago were working fine. The TV has never really been what I would call a great piece of electronic equipment. A great piece of something. But it was free and I can't argue with that. It still works if not for its slightly discolored screen. The VCR is in the same boat. But it finally did give up the ghost. First it stopped rewinding tapes and then it stopped recording. So I tossed it. But that left us without a way to record Sesame Street. Dun dun dun...