Imagine and Explore ….

Last week, I move this website to my new VPS server.

Now, using ubuntu gutsy and tunnel to HE.net, this website is also accessible using IPv6.

-rendo-

This post is inspired by wongsetress.com. He created a good indonesian movie streaming website using interesting method.  In http://rendo.info/fun, I tried to use the similar approach as he did.

My streaming pages are only give you the front page of the player and all the original files are still stored in their original website, such as: Youtube, RadioBlog, etc. With these method, I can put my streaming list in my own webpage without require big file storage  and high speed internet bandwidth to my server. Thanks to http://www.jeroenwijering.com who created the very great flash player.

Currenltly,  my fun page is still in very early version, I will update it with some new contents and I will also try to explore some possibilities to use this flash player for any other purpose.

-rendo-

Inspired by Khurt’s weblog at
http://islandinthenet.com/2006/10/10/get-google-talk-msn-yahoo-and-aol-all-talking/

I did some simple experiments with my own jabber server because I am curious about how the “transport” thing is working between jabber protocol and any other IMs.

For the experiments, I was using several jabber servers and clients:

• my own jabber server which is using jabberd as the jabber daemon
• jabbim.com as jabber server
• jaim.at as jabber server
• PyMSN as MSN transport from my jabber server
• XMPPY as Yahoo transport from my jabber server
• gtalk client
• PSI 0.11
• Pidgin
• Yahoo messenger 8.1
• MSN messenger 7.0

And here are the results:

1. message from YM/MSN unlisted contact to gtalk –> failed
2. add request from YM/MSN unlisted contact to gtalk –> success
3. add request from gtalk to YM or MSN using special address format –> success
4. message from deleted/removed contact to gtalk –> success
5. Availability status of Yahoo and MSN contact list are not stable in Gtalk/Jabber client. Sometimes, the contacts are shown as offline.
6. YM avatar in gtalk is changed. There are two default avatars in Yahoo transport, one for male and one for female.
7. MSN avatar in gtalk is the original MSN avatar.

Analysys:

1. gtalk is only receiving message from known contact
2. Add request to gtalk consist of two things: authorize new friend and add the new friend in the contact list
3. your friend needs to be authorized first before he/she can send a message to your gtalk
4. once your friend is authorized, he/she is still able to send a message to you although you have delete him/her id from your gtalk.
5. If you don’t want to receive any message from someone, you need to block him at your gtalk
6. The results are same for any jabber clients and jabber servers.
7. About the unstable contact list status, I think that the transport is not retrieving the status from Yahoo and MSN server often enough or maybe the transport protocol is not reliable.
8. The traffic flow if you send a message from gtalk to yahoo contact: you–> gtalk client –> gtalk server –> jabber server –> jabber transport –> yahoo/msn server –> your friend

So, the conclusion is, please re-consider the test result above if you want to integrate all your IM contact into your Gtalk. For me, I think i will not use this method at least until I can get stable contact list and maybe until I get a very reliable jabber server. I will not using my own jabber server because I still use it as my other experiments, and I prefer to use any open/public jabber server which is very reliable and fast.

-rendo-

Basically, most of this post is taken from http://juniper.cluepon.net/index.php/Olive with some modifications to install Qemu on FreeBSD host. As stated in website above, Olive is simply JunOS running on a PC which happens to not be installed inside a router. Olive is the natural state of a PC running JunOS when there is no PFE attached.

Why do I prefer to have Qemu on FreeBSD? There are several reasons:

• I have my own FreeBSD server connected with IP public all the time
• I don’t want to reduce my laptop performance because of running Qemu
• I am not always using my laptop which has Qemu installed
• I want to have dedicated PC for all simulation purposes

So, now we start. First of all, if you are using FreeBSD, I strongly recommend to use Ports, Don’t install Qemu manually if you don’t want to waste your time with some headache. There are two Qemu source in FreeBSD ports, Qemu and Qemu-devel. Choose Qemu-devel if you want to get fxp0 interface in your Olive. Fxp interface is only available in Qemu-devel right now, or if you want to make sure that your qemu version is alredy supporting fxp0 or not, you can check whether eepro100.c file is present in hw subdirectory inside the qemu source directory. If you have this file, you can sure that you will have fxp interface support in your qemu.

http://people.freebsd.org/~maho/qemu/qemu.html gives you very brief guide to install Qemu on FreeBSD. Don’t forget to install kqemu since it has significant impact on your performance.

If you finish with Qemu installation, you can continue your olive installation by referring to http://juniper.cluepon.net/index.php/Olive and http://www.smogey.net/tech/Juniper/Olive/index.htm. Smogey.net gives you very detail step by step FreeBSD and JunOS installation guide, don’t worry about the vmware, the procedure of installing FreeBSD and JunOS is the same between vmware and qemu. Just create your qemu virtual disk and start your qemu before installing the FreeBSD.

Or, if you already have Juniper Olive Vmware virtual disk (the vmdk file), you can use this vmdk on qemu. Just start qemu with this vmware vmdk.

One small tip from me, if you want to keep your image file as small as possible, convert your image format to qcow with compression format using qemu because i found that vmdk and normal qemu image format always gives you false size report, there are two size report, normal size and physical size. It is ok if you don’t have a plan to copy your image to somewhere else, because your operating system is referring to physical size, so you need not to worry if you see 10 G in your image size. BUT, if you copy this file to somewhere else, the destination folder/drive will allocate the normal size, so in this case, your destination drive will allocate 10G free space just for your empty image.

I created 5 fxp interfaces inside Qemu using the following command:

qemu -L . -m 256 -hda olive2.img -serial telnet::xxxx,server -localtime -net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=00:aa:00:00:01:02,model=i82559er -net nic,vlan=1,macaddr=00:a
a:00:00:01:03,model=i82559er -net nic,vlan=1,macaddr=00:aa:00:00:01:04,model=i82559er -net nic,vlan=2,macaddr=00:aa:00:00:01:05,model=i82559er -net nic,vlan=
2,macaddr=00:aa:00:00:01:06,model=i82559er -vnc :1 -usbdevice tablet -net tap,vlan=0,ifname=tap0

And, I got all my vlan interfaces and ospf up and running. This my screenshot of my Olive using JunOS 7.4.

btw, I have seen someone is testing Olive by handling around 45 Mbps traffic, running GRE tunnel, OSPF and having almost half internet full routes in the BGP prefix and it is stable enough.

rendo [dot] aw [at] gmail [dot] com

nb: I shut off my comment feature in this website due to spam. If you have any question, just drop my an email.