NEWS & UPDATES 》 Introducing TOFFEE-Fudge - Network Packet Generator

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.

TOFFEE TOFFEE Data-Center is specifically meant for Data Center, Cluster Computing, HPC applications. TOFFEE is built in Linux Kernel core. This makes it inflexible to adapt according to the hardware configuration. It does sequential packet processing and does not scale up well in large multi-core CPU based systems (such as Intel Xeon servers, Core i7 Extreme Desktop systems,etc). Apart from this since it is kernel based, if there is an issue in kernel, it may crash entire system. This becomes a challenge for any carrier grade equipment (CGE) hardware build.

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.

When you build a WAN Optimization device with TOFFEE the entire packet processing (data optimization) takes place in software layer or in other words more precisely Operating System kernel space. However if you have any compression or encryption hardware accelerator hardware card the parts of the TOFFEE packet processing modules can be offloaded to hardware layer and thus improving its efficiency.

Here is a complete log of my lab battery purchase, service record which I maintain in Google drive. These I use for my home (or my family generic use) as well as a part of my home lab. I maintain a detailed log this way to monitor the failure rate of these batteries. This will allow me to select a specific brand/model which has higher success rate and to monitor any premature failure/expiry. The service log helps me to monitor and schedule the next service routine so that I can maintain these batteries in tip-top condition.

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.

Here is a step-by-step DIY to build your own Intel based Mini PC WAN Optimization Device with TOFFEE. I chose this below Intel Celeron Mini PC since it is fan-less aluminium case and as well it has 2 dedicated inbuilt Gigabit Ethernet ports. You can use one for LAN Network and one for WAN Network.

Here is the TOFFEE WAN Optimization benchmarks of the TOFFEE version: TOFFEE-1.1.28. This is the current TOFFEE development version till date (2-Jul-2016). This is a HPC TOFFEE variant meant for high-end custom build servers and high-end desktops (i.e High Performance Computing a.k.a HPC). TOFFEE built this way often needs customized kernel compilation and build such as processor specific and hardware specific tune-ups since it is highly CPU intensive (if not offloaded via Hardware Accelerator Cards).

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.

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).

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.

TOFFEE-Butterscotch is a variant of TOFFEE can be used to save and optimize your Home/SOHO Internet/WAN bandwidth. Unlike TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) TOFFEE-Butterscotch is a non peer-to-peer (and asymmetric) network optimization solution. This makes TOFFEE-Butterscotch an ideal tool for all Home and SOHO users.

I have a huge repository (or collection) of sample Wireshark packet capture files for reference. I use them extensively for research and development of TOFFEE as well to understand various protocol PDUs and protocol standards. I personally collected various test captures via Wireshark during my test and experimental research setup during the course of TOFFEE development. Say if you are a student and learning Networking and or say VoIP data and VoIP packets, you can analyse my VoIP sample Wireshark captures. Or in other case assume you are doing some quick research (or development) and want to refer few handful of VoIP packets then you can download and analyse my sample packet capture files.