MTR, also known as Matt’s Trace Route, is an enahanced traceroute utility which after making the initial run continues to rerun the traceroute and calculate hop-specific packet loss and latencies.
Unfortunately, virtually everytime someone calls me and mentions “packet loss” and “MTR” in the same breath, it’s because they do not understand the output.
Dunluce Castle, Inner Courtyard
A few further thoughts on things that people forget to take into account when attempting to measure bandwidth:
As I work in a ISP, I (unfortunately) have to deal with the abuse mailbox. And unfortuantely, these means responding to DMCA notices from US companies. How do you deal with a copyright infringement happening on your network, but when the holder is in the US and trying to apply US law?
DISCLAIMER: I am not a solicitor.
An issue that comes up for me at work time and time again is customers misunderstanding how bandwidth is measured.
In my spare time, I’m working on a tool for photographers for managing photo collections. I was unable to find one that matched my requirements in the open source world, and frankly didn’t like the look of a lot of the commercial ones. Plus, making it web based means I can access my photos from anywhere in the world.
Click through for a demo video of the progress so far…
A common problem with ADSL in the UK is that most connections are still using PPPoA. This means that if you want a computer to have a public IP address on one of these connections, you need to either have a block of IP addresses routed by your ISP to your router (at extra) cost, or you use a USB modem. There’s no real option for those folks that want to connect something like a SonicWall or any other firewall device directly to the line.
The most common attack vector on Linux web servers, is to get something uploaded onto the server that can then be executed. Most of these automated attacks try to put their payload into /tmp, which is universally writable by any user, and then execute it.
But what if they couldn’t execute it?