News and Updates

My 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM hard-drive suddenly started making mild clicking noise. I found this happening since morning. I was suspicious that something wrong in this drive and when I opened the Linux Disks app, I can find the cause of this issue. The disk is increasingly getting read errors. Besides I can see various other parameters such as Power-On Hours, Temperature, Head flying hours, etc.

Here is my second software development update of TOFFEE-Butterscotch. In the previous update (28-Oct-2016) I discussed about the Alerts, etc. Whereas in my first TOFFEE-Butterscotch news update I have introduced about TOFFEE-Butterscotch research, project specifications, use-cases, etc.

TOFFEE can be used to optimize expensive Wireless backhaul network infrastructure. TOFFEE can be deployed over existing slow or often outdated old backhaul networks too. This will leverage mobile ISPs and network service providers to reduce their bulk IT CapEx and OpEx Costs.

Here is my home lab monthly power-consumption readings for research. This will help to measure and monitor the overall power usage and assess the power requirements. This will help me in future purchases such as UPS, battery upgrades and so on. And as well remove replace old obsolete hardware with new less power-consuming devices.

In case if you need to deploy TOFFEE along with your existing VPN devices you can deploy the same as shown below. This will allow your VPN devices to encrypt your TOFFEE WAN Optimized network data. NOTE: Make sure about the VPN deployment topology done in the right order. Else TOFFEE (LAN side) may get VPN encrypted packets which may not be possible (and or difficult) to further optimize. Hence always make sure to deploy them in a topology suggested below so that TOFFEE devices are out of VPN tunnel.

You can build a basic TOFFEE WAN Optimization hardware completely in software layer (i.e its networking data-plane and control-plane). And if you are a product manufacturer you can make commercial WAN Optimization products with TOFFEE with software layer alone. And if you choose to improve its performance, you can use any third-party PCIe Compression Accelerator cards.

TOFFEE-Mocha is my dream project which I thought working on it since several years. I want to make a WAN emulation software which is straight forward and simple to use. I used tc scripts along with iptables for testing my TOFFEE (and TrafficSqueezer before TOFFEE) and I am not quite satisfied with the same. As one can understand these scripts are not meant for WAN emulation.

Here are some of the screenshots of the new upcoming TOFFEE WAN Optimization release and live demo.

Here is my VLOG Youtube video of the same which includes details about version release notes, future road-map and so on. The TOFFEE release is highly optimized and customized for hardware platforms such as x86-64 based Intel NUC and other Intel mobile computing platforms such as laptops and so on. This version (or release) is not suited and so not recommended to be used for high-end desktop and server hardware platform.

TrafficSqueezer is an open-source WAN Optimization project. TrafficSqueezer is mainly a research project which is started around mid-2006. It is initially started as a research (or prototype) code even before it is officially registered in Sourceforge.net. But this code is just primitive user-space raw socket modules. This is later refined and a pre-alpha version is created. Followed by which Alpha release. This prototype code is moved from user-space to Linux Kernel (Kernel Space) and then the journey begin in terms of making a serious WAN Optimization solution. Once the pre-beta and beta releases are complete the mainstream series is started.

Today I completed doing all the changes which are meant for the new upcoming TOFFEE-Mocha release. I have increased the resolution and the range of all factor variables. Instead 1 to 10 range now they have a range of 1 to 30. Unlike before the value 1 means it is lot more intense (or in some cases less intense) and the uppermost value 30 means lot less intense (or in some cases lot intense).