ICTS vs users

For some reason there is an article praising UCT ICTS's War on Terror...er...Bandwidth:

[snip lots]
ICTS has implemented Packeteer Packetshaper
[snip lots more]

AFAIK this actually happened ages ago. So there's no real reason to trot this out now unless people are griping that GEN3 isn't doing much for them.

And there's no mention of what will happen once:

• UCT transitions to SANReN and has a 10 Gbps link to the local node, and
• TENET moves to the 10 Gbps overseas pipe due mid-2009

I don't see the Packeteer appliance scaling to multi-Gbps speeds without serious extra $$$ invested. And would it be worth doing so?

Consider this paper on web search clickstreams http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1177080.1177110]:

The MWN [Munich Scientific Network] provides a 10Gbit/s singly-homed Internet connection to roughly 50,000 hosts at two major universities along with additional institutes; link utilization is typically only around 200–500 Mbit/s in each direction.

Now this might have been back in 2006; it doesn't really matter if the traffic demand has doubled since then. Also, since major local and international peering will then be in effect, actual transit pressure should decrease.

C'mon ICTS - plan ahead now!

Happy birthday to me

Thank you to everyone that wished me a Happy Birthday (and there were a lot of you), far-flung* or not.

I did have a great day, and I got loads of really cool (and some really cool and unusual) presents.

Based on my experiences with this birthday, I can definitely recommend having a birthday to anyone. I myself plan to have many more.



* Whomever said that technology depersonalises our social interaction was a 'nana.

More Firefox and ISA

The advice in the previous post about Firefox interacting badly with Microsoft ISA seems to be outdated.

The correct advice now:

1. Open (i.e. type) about:config in the location bar
2. Search for network.negotiate-auth.allow-proxies in the search bar
3. Double-click the line to set the value to false

You should now be able to enter your username/password combo once, have it remembered, and not be pestered with millions of pop-ups.

Flatlining

With all of the negative feeling towards TENET and GEN3 because of the recent outages, I thought it might be quite amusing to show the reverse:



CPUT's main Bellville campus is obviously in need of more, More, MORE! bandwidth. Roll on, SANREN.

150 GB DSL caps?

From the latest DSL Prime:

My follow-up article will be unreliable sources, which I'm factchecking more carefully. For now, a few types to distrust:

• The FCC or anyone else who takes seriously a 200K definition of broadband.
• Anyone who defends a bandwidth cap below about 150 gigabytes per month, except where bandwidth costs are unusually high or the service selling for under about $20. (India, South Africa, possibly the U.K.). Ask mo [sic] for the numbers if you don't get it.

I guess for South Africa, he's specifically talking about high bandwidth costs, 'cos I don't know of any ISPs selling DSL for $20/R160 here.