Networking for the terminally thick

[Blumf]

I know we're going massively off topic now, but anyhow... I can't recommend KVM enough as a VM Host. Its performance knocks the socks off VirtualBox (perhaps unsurprisingly, being a bare metal HyperVisor) and generally out performs Xen (although I have never used Xen).

Last time I looked, aaaages ago (before it was part of the kernel src), I didn't see much performance, it was okay, but no better than anything else I tried. Might give it another look sometime. I mainly recommend VirtualBox because it's cross platform, but I don't like the stench of Oracle that surrounds it these days.

The thing I like most though (and Blumf may look away now) is that it supports X-Forwarding through SSH, so you can easily setup, configure and remote on to your machine all from an SSH session.

Anything you can SSH into, you can forward X, such a handy feature, however...

Will the arrival of Wayland make this even easier? I'm hoping Wayland will be standard (and working) in the next LTS.

Wayland is sadly dropping network transparency (they'll still support X for now, but Wayland apps won't do it). It's sad, but I understand their reasoning, I think they get some undeserved flack for the decision. Simply put, there's too much raw bitmaps being pumped about in modern GUI apps and the way X handles these things will never be efficient. VNC, RDP, etc. are the way to go (and admin stuff should be CLI so you only need SSH)

[Too Many Cochranes]

Aww bugger. Having tried VNC before and finding it difficult to set up I was hoping it'd be a breeze with Wayland. It was promoted as being much less CPU intensive for displaying media and just generally less wasteful of resources, which led me to believe that transporting the desktop over network would be greatly streamlined.

I'm still looking forward to whatever flavour emerges. I'm still unsure how Mir is going to fit in. Are Canonical going to release something that's a combination of Wayland and Mir, or will it be down to user choice do you know?

[Too Many Cochranes]

Long post here in the comments about Wayland and Mir:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2015/05/ubuntu-15-10-release-schedule-wily-werewolf

I'm trying out Wily beta 1 in a VM. It's nice but Ubuntu are looking to ostracise themselves pushing Mir instead of Wayland.

edit: sorry for shafting this thread doppelkorn.

[Zetetic]

Dragging the thread a bit more back to the OP then, in particular the second question:

Is there a good introduction to IP routing that anyone would recommend? (Ideally one with references to implementation using Linux.)

[doppelkorn]

Dragging the thread back to my opulent lifestyle choices, I managed to set up Sonos last night after some teething issues.

The router seems to handle it like a boss. The annoying thing is that to connect your Spotify account you need Spotify Premium. That particular upgrade has been on the cards for years but they've got me by the short and curlies now.

I had another crack at diagnosing my SHIT internet speed and spend hours talking to Plusnet and ended up logging a fault. I'm a bit baffled by my flat's telephony wiring. It seems like the master socket's dead, as is the test but an extension socket is working. Anyway, man should be coming round at some point - no doubt at great cost.

[EFB]

I'm actually moving away from LVM for this reason and migrating fully to Raid 6, where I can also see the disks as one big volume, but with the bonus of Double Parity. I know some people will put LVM on top of Raid, but I'm still not sold on what the advantages of doing this are over, say, just expanding the filesystem when new disks are added.

LVM solves the problem there of what you do when you can't fit any more disks into your RAID array. Unless you're using software RAID, you're going to run out of physical ports. With LVM, you can have a second RAID array, and add it to your LVM config, and still see one big drive, just now made up of both of your arrays. Then you have double parity on the underlying arrays, and the ease of LVM on top. Lovely!

[touchingcloth]

I had another crack at diagnosing my SHIT internet speed and spend hours talking to Plusnet and ended up logging a fault.

What do you pay for your broadband, and how far are you from the telecoms cabinet? Often speed issues come down to one or both of those factors, and aren't truly solvable until you switch provides/pay more/opt for a different infrastructure (cable or fibre-to-the-home).

Have a look at something like this website to see if the speeds you are getting are par for the course for PlusNet customers in your area, and think about switching if other providers look like they provide a consistently better connection.

I'm a bit baffled by my flat's telephony wiring. It seems like the master socket's dead, as is the test but an extension socket is working. Anyway, man should be coming round at some point - no doubt at great cost.

Yeah, it could be a wiring issue too. Are you able to move your router closer (read: with as short a length of wire as possible) to your various phone sockets around the house? Can you try removing microfilters and/or DSL faceplates from any of those sockets? Basically try every permutation you can and run speedtests (ideally with your PC connected via a cable rather than Wi-Fi) in each permutation. Might save you a pricey call out fee. Also, having stuff in front of your router can play merry fuck with your wireless speeds - I once diagnosed a speed issue as being down to having wine bottles between the router and my laptop.

[doppelkorn]

So I don't want to go too much into this but I've tried as many tests as possible, learnt a fair bit about networking and have come up completely stumped.

It was working at a fairly steady 10-12 Mbps for as long as we'd been in the flat then in June it tanked to about 1 Mbps across devices, did a billion tests as guided by Plusnet then it miraculously went back up after about 3-4 days. Then last week it tanked again. All my tests (hours spent on chat to Plusnet, doing all their diagnostics, Googling everything under then sun) have revealed bugger all. I suspect it could be the wiring (which I can't work out at all. It looks like it was wired in by a lunatic) but it seems odd that it has happened before then went back to being OK.

[touchingcloth]

It could just be Plusnet throttling your connection, then - ISPs are very cagey about how, when and by how much they throttle your bandwidth, so good luck trying to get a straight answer out of their phone or call-out engineers on what might be causing any speed drops.

Would there be any financial penalty if you were to stop taking your broadband soon? If not - and so long as you're committed to splashing a bit of cash on the problem anyway - it might make more sense to switch to another provider, possibly at a higher monthly rate. That way you'll save the call out fee for an engineer who might not actually be able to get to the bottom of your issue, and if you still have problems with the new provider you'll get slightly more joy from putting a bit of stick about as a new customer than a longer standing one.

[Uncle TechTip]

Internal telephony connections can be a real pain in the arse. Even with micro filters and taking into account your modem is not on an extension. I had exactly these problems. I ended up ditching the extensions - nobody was using them anyway - and moved the master socket to much nearer where it enters the house. Slung a very long modem cable downstairs and bingo - my Adsl which would bump along at an ok rate but with regular drop outs was suddenly top rate all the time.

I've since switched to fibre and that too is always solid. Presume you are not talking about fibre, if you have thought of switching bear in mind that you get a new master socket and no reliance on the extensions - modem goes straight to master. So if your master doesn't work - which it should - getting fibre could turn out to be a cost-effective way of getting the repairs you need. I think it's forty quid and they'll give you new everything including extensions.

[MojoJojo]

Dragging the thread a bit more back to the OP then, in particular the second question:

Is there a good introduction to IP routing that anyone would recommend? (Ideally one with references to implementation using Linux.)

I feel like I should respond to this since I'm the only one who's responded to the second question[nb]and to be a pedant, SDN would be used within a single company (autonomous system) - so it's not particularly internet[nb]although this depends how you define network[/nb] even if it uses the internet protocols[/nb]. But I have my degree from over a decade ago and the stuff I've picked up from work - which is mostly from the bit pushing side and mostly from a telecomms approach.

What are you trying to do ? Basic IP routing is just Longest Prefix Match. Are you looking at using a Linux box as a router at home? If so you want to google setting up a linux gateway.

[doppelkorn]

Regarding my broadband speed, we're on Plusnet's most basic package so not fibre and I can't get a straight answer off the website to say whether I could get fibre or not.

It's a shame because they've been pretty good until this speed issue and the customer service is quite good but as soon as I've hit this problem I've come up against so many obstacles. I suspect throttling, too, as does my technically inclined friend who moved off Plusnet. But he had to press very hard to get them to admit they were throttling.

[touchingcloth]

^ they won't admit to it, and there will be small print in your terms of service that means they don't have to provide the advertised throughput any of the time, much less all of the time. Unless you're paying a fair whack then it's not going to be in the provider's interest to get to the bottom of your speed issues.

When paying in the £5-15 range with Sky, Talk Talk and Bulldog I've had very, very variable service. I was much more stable when paying ~£25 to BE Un Limited, and I've had near flawless service with both BT and Virgin on their more expensive fibre packages.

[doppelkorn]

UPDATE: my speed profile had got stuck, which is interesting. They reset it and now it's back up. I can C+P the transcript of my internet chat if anyone's interested.

Now looking as NAS boxes. I was also looking at cloud backup for that but then I was like naaaaaah cos I'll never be able to restore 2TB of data from he cloud. I'll just back up work stuff in the cloud and all my musci and pics on an HDD which I keep in the world's safest place: another room.

[Too Many Cochranes]

If you get a NAS with even the most basic form of RAID (RAID 1 mirror) then your data's safe as long as you can quickly pop a new drive in there if one starts to fail. One of those jobbies with a door and removable drives which allow you to turn off, swap drive and turn on. Should be enough for very basic data redundancy.

[MojoJojo]

If you get a NAS with even the most basic form of RAID (RAID 1 mirror) then your data's safe as long as you can quickly pop a new drive in there if one starts to fail. One of those jobbies with a door and removable drives which allow you to turn off, swap drive and turn on. Should be enough for very basic data redundancy.

As a painful week at work in January showed me, that's not really true. Although was partly due to a shitty RAID controller (har to know if you're getting a decent one though).

For tedium purposes - one drive failed. Ok order another one, would be remarkably unlucky if second drive failed before it arrives tomorrow. Except the second drive's electronics have failed and it messes up the RAID controller - which in it's failing state lasts long enough to mark the OK drive as failed, which stops any attempt at trying to recover from. And there is no way to override that.

RAID is good for fast recovery, but it's not a substitution for backup.

[Too Many Cochranes]

Aye. Probably a false economy to get a cheap NAS if you're after data redundancy. Might be worth forking out for a Synology or something classy if data's important.

[touchingcloth]

Hard drives are cheap, so a decent solution is getting something like a 2-bay NAS box with 2 2TB drives in RAID and a third 2TB drive in an external enclosure for taking periodic backups. You'd be unlucky to lose both drives in the NAS box before you could build a new one into the RAID, but you'd have a backup if that ever did happen.

It's probably worth buying something other than the cheapest of the cheap NAS solution, but you'll soon get into a world of diminishing returns where it's the consumer-grade hard drives that are your weak point rather than the NAS solution which is lashing them together.

[EFB]

X forwarding looks ideal for me, because I need to run some QT programs on the server. I'll check it out.

Will the arrival of Wayland make this even easier? I'm hoping Wayland will be standard (and working) in the next LTS.

Oh dear :( Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but wayland doesn't do that at all, and Canonical are going the Mir route, not wayland. Because they invented Mir, therefore it is good. Ignore the fact that various toolkits and vendors are rejecting support for it because of canonical's behaviour...

[Too Many Cochranes]

I'd have thought that Wayland was designed with extra compatibility for something like VNC. Seems rather short sighted of them. I'm actually considering using fedora in future because of Canonical developing Mir alongside the rest of the world using Wayland. It seems like they're only doing it to coincide with Ubuntu Touch for smartphones, as I think there's some kind of interoperability between Mir on desktop and Touch on IoT devices. Shame on them, as it's a waste of good developers and not helping the GNU community.

[Blumf]

I think Weyland's long term plan is to, at least, encourage a tidy VNC/RDP solution to work naturally with it, if not build it in directly (this is 'UNIX philosophy', having each part do it's little thing, not building giant monoliths (<cough> systemd <cough>)). But for now, they're concentrating on basic desktop support and leaving the X11 service glued on the side.

As for Canonical/Ubuntu, fuck em. They did a great job of making a usable distro for the masses, but all the time they've been stupid assholes with the wider community. A distinct NIH attitude plus dereliction of their duty to pass changes back upstream, not to mention the spyware. I know they need to get cash flow, and that phone thing sounds okay, but I'm not trusting them after their behaviour. That phone is going to fail, and it's mostly their fault that it will bomb.

I recommend Mint for no-fuss desktop use. Pretty much as easy to use as Ubuntu, but without the crap, and the devs seem to make and effort fixing the details.

[Too Many Cochranes]

From the bits I've read the spyware (which amounted to sending Amazon your Unity search requests) was removed after the outcry. It's still left Canonical tarnished, though.

I feel that they're dicks for developing Mir at exactly the same time as their help would be very handy getting Wayland as a challenger to Windows/OS X and make Linux just as slick. They know that the rest of the community is forging ahead with something very significant to modernise GNU/Linux but are happy to sit back and do their own thing. How long has X been around? Since 1986 or something? Now that there's a big initiative to make something new they're not interested. I hope Mir's shite, to be honest.

I think there's definitely a market for a Linux phone though, so good on them for that. I'll continue to run Ubuntu 14.04 as a server OS because it's so reliable and I fancy forwarding X over SSH when I get round to it. When Wayland becomes mainstream in a year or two I'll change. I'd agree that the Wayland devs must have a plan for a VNC style solution. In a video I watched recently, Daniel Stone explains how Wayland is designed to be much more efficient with bandwidth than X. This would tie in nicely with a VNC platform. He also rightly says that when X was created it was for use on computers that were nothing like what we have now, with streaming media and window composition etc, so it's way out of date and it's about bloody time.

[EFB]

I think wayland is the way forward.

VNC doesn't care what you run, wayland and X perform the same over VNC because VNC just captures what has already been drawn and does its own, separate thing.

Mir has been very unstable for me, and it seems like another case of Canonical having big dreams and not enough resource and cooperation from the community to achieve it. The desktop seems like a forgotten target for them based on the quality of recent releases. Internally, their org constantly undergoes reshuffles and changes priorities, sometimes month to month. There are a lot of big egos in charge, and the direction is set based on what they think is cool. I remember one of their tech leads having a huge meltdown and go on a ego trip rant because someone disgreed with him. It was embarrassing to watch.

There was a time when I was excited for ubuntu touch, but android has progressed so much now that I don't care about it any more.

[EFB]

Daniel Stone explains how Wayland is designed to be much more efficient with bandwidth than X.

Ah you're right! Last I looked at this was before the experimental code for remoting happened, so I hope vnc won't be needed when I start running Wayland full time. He's right too, it cant be worse than X!!

[Too Many Cochranes]

Aye. It looks promising and hopefully with most of the GNU/Linux community behind them it'll wipe the floor with whatever Canonical have planned with Mir.

I'm having a look fedora 22 in VirtualBox and will probably swap my laptop from Ubuntu to fedora 23 when it comes out, so that I'm using Wayland rather than Mir. I use the GNOME shell version of Ubuntu on my laptop anyway, so the jump to fedora isn't a big deal because fedora uses GNOME as standard.