Many users, despite having a good Net connection, complain about poor surfing and download speeds. While an organization could pay for additional bandwidth, a better option might be to manage the bandwidth they already have. There are numerous bandwidth management software tools available. In this article we will explore managing network bandwidth using the dummynet [...]

All of the operations considered in this article are operations upon a router, whether that router is a Linux box or Cisco dedicated hardware or some other type of machine. In this chapter I consider the traditional methods of IPv4 routing as using static configurations that are manually input by the network administrator. 1.1 Traditional [...]

Subversion manages branches a bit differently than CVS; there’s a good document (SVN for CVS users) at the Subversion site. You should read that. The long short of it is that you have to restructure your directories a little bit before using Subversion. Caveat: this restructuring isn’t neccessary, and the following tree hierarchy isn’t neccessarily [...]

During the design of IPv4, people thought that 32 bits were enough for the world. Looking back into the past, 32 bits were enough until now and will perhaps be enough for another few years. However, 32 bits are not enough to provide each network device with a global address in the future. Think about [...]

On any IP header, the first 4 bits are reserved for protocol version. So theoretically a protocol number between 0 and 15 is possible: 4: is already used for IPv4 5: is reserved for the Stream Protocol (STP, RFC 1819 / Internet Stream Protocol Version 2) (which never really made it to the public) The [...]

IPv6 is a new layer 3 protocol (see linuxports/howto/intro_to_networking/ISO – OSI Model) which will supersede IPv4 (also known as IP). IPv4 was designed long time ago (RFC 760 / Internet Protocol from January 1980) and since its inception, there have been many requests for more addresses and enhanced capabilities. Latest RFC is RFC 2460 / [...]

FTP on Linux and other Unix systems allows you to pass shell commands to the ftp client by using the pipe symbol ‘|’ as the first character of the file name. With this feature you can send a very large file to a remote host using /dev/zero as input and /dev/null as output.

NIC teaming is the process of grouping together several physical NICs into one single logical NIC, which can be used for network fault tolerance and transmit load balance. The process of grouping NICs is called teaming. Teaming has two purposes: • Fault Tolerance: By teaming more than one physical NIC to a logical NIC, high [...]

The 8 Position 8 Contact (8P8C) modular plugs and sockets are communications connectors. Under the same naming scheme, an 8P6C connector has eight positions, with six positions containing conductors, and a 6P6C connector has six positions, all containing conductors. 8P8C connectors are typically used to terminate twisted pair cable.
These connectors are often called RJ45 plugs and sockets. This is technically incorrect because the RJ45 standard specifies the mechanical interface but a different wiring scheme than T568A/B, which is often used for Ethernet and telephones.
8P8C consists of two paired components: the male plug and the female socket. Each has eight equally-spaced conductors. On the plug, these conductors are flat contacts positioned parallel with the connector body. Inside the socket, the conductors are suspended diagonally toward the insertion interface. When an 8P8C plug is mated with an 8P8C socket, the conductors meet and create an electrical connection. Spring tension in the socket’s conductors ensure a good interface with the plug and allow for slight travel during insertion and removal. The 8P8C connector is probably best known for its use in Ethernet. Since about 2000, it is nearly universal as the type of connector used on a cable that carries a single Ethernet network, and has replaced many older connector types. Older connectors have also been phased out as modern cables no longer have the high current and voltage requirements for which the bulkier connectors were designed.

If you are currently running a rpm-based squid binary, and you have just made a fresh fedora installation, here’s an on how to upgrade and install your currently running Squid proxy web caching server. By definition: Squid is a high-performance proxy caching server for Web clients, supporting FTP, gopher, and HTTP data objects. Unlike traditional caching [...]

The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. MRTG generates HTML pages containing PNG images which provide a LIVE visual representation of this traffic. MRTG is basically used for generating graphs to a device, network host, IP-based appliances for monitoring usage, live data and statistics usage. This [...]