Recent content on CeroWrt notebook: On fixing the internet since 2011
Last year I had the temerity and gumption to attempt to make some predictions for the year ahead . Let´s see how I did, and then move to making some predictions for next year. I realize I am posting this blog 2 months into the year, which is kind of cheating, but… My 2023 predictions, revisited Y2000-era tech recession I was wrong. While we did see a great deal of shrinkage here, what I…
Today an otherwise really nice article appeared in Arstechnica, praising NASA and JPL for taking risks and building the amazing Ingenuity helicopter . I agree with the bulk of it. It was an inspiration to see it fly as it did. The author, however, gives way too much credit to the Iphone for making it all possible, IMHO. The concept of flying Ingenuity came along at just the right time, in the…
This past Wednesday, I decided to take the Amtrak “Coast Starlight” - Train 14 - from SJC to Vancouver for the talks I am giving there this weekend. I still have a lot of writing to do, and I figured that I could finish up the slides on the trip. The cellphones worked rarely, and the wifi not at all. I loved that! I just needed to write! I ended up swapping stories with everyone I met,…
Although I am enjoying The Pots and Pans blog tremendously, and have, in fact linked back to it from my blogroll – we disagree on more than a few points on most of them. Here is something worth thinking about, with actually using fiber to make for a better internet, overall, an excellent set of measurements of real world physical fiber latencies, and a good starting point . Here, also is a string…
After completing my months long survey of the state of fq_codel worldwide , back in April, 2022, I’d set aside a week to do something (anything), else, take a bit of vacation, go visit the WiFi testing house that I love (CandelaTech), and a potential new client. Also, according to google trends, Oregon was a hotbed of bufferbloat related queries, and there were a couple good concerts up…
In 1989-1993 I worked on a science fiction novel. I built it around three ideas that I’d had since college. 1) I was in love with the attributes of a NEO, “Toutatis”. 2) My college roomate, Tom Phelan, had plunked in numbers for the estimated gravitational field of a small fast-rotator asteroid (a spherical cow), and had got a surprising result. Arthur C Clark’s tethers…
One of my all time favorite papers on Fair Queuing is: “ Evaluating the Number of Active Flows in a Scheduler Realizing Fair Statistical Bandwidth Sharing ”. The catch - the only catch - is without sufficient multiplexing you end up needing AQM, although the authors propose alternatives that are still worth considering. What? You thought I’d blog more? Please read the paper,…
One of my disappointments in the Bufferbloat effort is how little the cloudy services have recognised that this problem along the edge affects their businesses, and taken steps to inform their users and incent their ISPs to make things better. There is only so much reach the bufferbloat mailing lists , the IETF AQM working group , reddit, and blog entries like Jim Gettys’ can have, and not…
Recently an otherwise really excellent summary of Juniper’s features , the problems they forsaw in having offchip memory for packets, and in the potental of Nick McKeown’s latest work on buffer sizing to solve those, went by on LinkedIn. I pointed out (rather pithily, I’ll admit) that the piece had somehow missed the last decade+ of Flow Queuing and AQM development, like RFC8290…
For over two years, now, I have had shared with hundreds of the top engineers in the world a document called An Upgrade in Place . Everyone I know in the bufferbloat and OpenWrt communities has participated, and I’ve had contributions to it as varied as the former CTO of ICANN, David Conrad, to Vint Cerf of Google, and Jason Livingood of Comcast, and and many, many others. It has long been…
The Bufferbloat Project operates a small flent of flent servers around the world, courtesy of our good friends at Linode, and paid for, in part, from my Patreon subscribers. These servers also have iperf2 on them, irtt, and a few other benchmark tools. I am planning to add newer ones like the new Apple “goresponsiveness” one at some point soon, as well as update to the latest iperf2.…
I spent last weekend ranting about the flaws in multiple new web speedtests from cloudflare, speedtest, netflix and others . It’s not fair, scientifically, to not whinge about the flaws (and “features”) in my own network tests. Still, Flent has been the test tool of choice for the core researchers in the bufferbloat effort for 12 years, it’s widely available, and I wish…
I have many kvetches about the new “latency under load” (LUL) network tests designed and distributed over the past year. I am delighted! that they are happening, but most really need third party evaluation, and calibration, and a solid explanation of what network pathologies they do and don’t cover. Also a red-team attitude towards them all is needed, as well as more folk,…
Over Christmas, I splurged (600 bucks is a lot for me) and got myself a shiny new google Chromebook, the ACER 516GE. It had all the features a gamer might want: a big, bright display, 8 Intel gen 12 cores, and WiFi6E. I used to game a lot (Starcraft was a favorite), and I was looking forward to trying Steam again with a laptop capable of it. This bleeding edge combination of 2.5Gbits, with WiFi…
My 2023 Predictions Sometimes it takes just the right amount of alcohol and fuzzy thinking, surrounded by others equally impaired, to come up with a vision for the near future that may or may not come true. This is mine. I hope many of these things don’t come true. Unfortunately, we are finding some of my worst nightmares, coming true, all over the world. (more about this plot at the bottom…