BangBits

In late 2011 I bought the Apple Macbook Air 13" (model 4,2 with 128GB SSD) to replace my aging road-warrior Dell 420. As much as I was impressed by Apple's hardware and the Macbook Air in particular, I was never taken by their software or the OSX that comes with the Macbook Air when you buy it. So within a week or so, I started experimenting putting Ubuntu (my then favorite OS) onto it. Things may have improved by then, but it was quite a task to get Ubuntu installed and set up properly - much more difficult than setting up Linux on a non-Apple laptop. The end result was a functioning but fragile setup, where each update to Ubuntu (new kernel in particular) would require me to reboot into safe mode and manually edit various files. As chef Ramsay would say, what a f...... nightmare. After 1 1/2 year and a dangerously outdated system (so many Java vulnerabilities), I decided it was time for a re-install. This time around however, I chose to try out the new favorite kid on the...

Having recently purchased a new NAS device , as well as upgraded network cables in my house to cat6 (1Gbps), I started wondering about just how fast and healthy my network setup was. Are all cables in order? Are any of my switches a bottleneck? Any particular slow endpoints? performance challenged There are of course commercial software to assist in this, but after having compiled and loaded up a bunch of Linux software onto my small NAS, it was only natural to give "iperf" a try. It's a small open source client-server utility you start in listening mode on one device, and in transmission mode on another, and have it transfer a bunch of random data over TCP. You can obtain iperf from sourceforge , from your Linux package manager or just Google for precompiled binaries if you are lazy. Simple unidirectional test The process is simple, log onto the receiving device and run iperf in listening mode, in the following case it's my Synology NAS: NAS> iperf -s -p 5...