Roelf Diedericks

Simeon mentioned Open Access and in doing so provided a sleight-of-hand reference to Neology in a post of his, after Joe, posted “Broadband in Joe’s world…”

Having read some of Joe’s views on what a network should look like, and stumbling across “no routing, no PPPoE lameness” I felt that I had to re-examine whether PPPoE is lame, and whether PPP itsself, is dead. It also made me thought more in-depth about my vision of a modern open access network. Back when Neology did it’s OA network in Tshwane, we had a LOAD of technical issues and visions and some really crazy ideas about how to get it done.

Reality, however came when we started implementing.

Joe’s post and architecture is noble. The devil, is as always in the details.

Layer2!=Ethernet

I can’t find fault with Joe’s Layer2 design. As far as it pertains to Metro-E.

Ethernet is simply the most ubiquitous protocol around, and regardless of whether the backhaul switching  incarnation is PBT, or QinQ or whatever collision domain limiting architecture the next vendor may invent, the bottom line around Joe’s Open Access network remains Ethernet.

Everyone’s got it.

How Layer2 is managed in the collision domain, and how Ethernet is trunked back to the  ISP of your choice is largely semantics and arguments around Layer2 backhaul implementations. Back when we did Tshwane, none of these technologies or standard really existed, so we simply adopted a “make things so” approach.

Limiting’s ones scope to Ethernet as Layer2 however is just not entirely viable if you’re considering to be an Open Access network operator.

Ethernet isn’t everything. The fact that I’m still maintaining one of the most feature-rich l2tpns fork’s thats now been IOT’d on everything from 3GPP PDSN’s, IPWireless INC’s  to Huawei WiMAX ASN Gateways, and GGSN’s  is a tribute to Neology  understanding of Layer2 technologies.

We’ve had do things with what we had available, what customers demand, and that has allowed us a great understanding of Layer2 access… Ethernet is but a single aspect of layer 2 access…

“ISP Preselect” is and always has been the core issue as it should be for any Open Access network that’s layered around Access, Management, and Services.

Layer2 Authentication

Joe mentioned that “To get on to the switch fabric beyond my block I use something like dot1x”.

It would be nice, in fact if 802.1x was the defacto mechanism EVERYWHERE for getting your Ethernet layer access, even if it is just “on your own block”. That would allow you to switch ISP’s at a moments notice without waiting for some “NOC Engineer” to “reconfigure” your port on the switch to now plug into ISP(a). It makes absolute sense.

Change your 802.1x credentials and BOOM, you are now trunked into ISP(b) network, rather than ISP(a)’s network.

This is generally achieved by simply slapping a few attributes onto the RADIUS  EAP-TLS/TTLS reply, and  is something that most metro switches these days  understand.

The AAA support in 802.1x means that your desktop, or notebook can  simply supply a certificate, which (gasp) will probably require  a username and password to validate the certficate. EAP-TTLS will simply require a username and password if you’ve got the AAA server cert signed bya part of your CA chain.

All of this  would allow the  Open Access network  to connect you to the service provider of your choice, via VLAN or _insert_funky_metro_backhaul_protocol_here by simpy changing your 802.1x credentials.

It also (quite neatly) allows the OpenAccess network provider and ISP to comply with some of South Africa’s niggly regulations such as RICA, that requires the loop provider, and ISP to positively identify their customer.

The problematic part itself is 802.1x and how it shits on the user experience.

The EAP Challenge

802.1x generally uses some kind of EAP based authentication protocol. So, which EAP would you like to use today ?

PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-MD5, EAP-TTLS, EAP-(INSERT_TLA_HERE)?

EAP, in it’s bountiful incarnations represents a number of  challenges:

Firstly, that of client-side support: Yes, Windows has it, MacOS (maybe) has it, Linux has it. If you install the right package, and twiddle the right knobs. Good luck if you’re running something odd.

Second, is that of a decent trusted PKM infrastructure, which (I’m assuming) is partly what has got Joe so excited.

TrustFabric could play a pivotal role in providing PKM infrastructure services for something such as an 8021.x based Open Access network. There’s some nice dollars to be made in that. However, people like Verisign, Thawte and others have got SAAS PKM infrastructure available as well, and have been playing that game for a long time. Even “open” platforms such as OpenID has made movements in the PKM direction.  It’s a case of “who can issue certs the easiest”.

The final and biggest challenge behind EAP and ANY kind of PKM authentication remains “getting that damned certificate installed”, and working,  and presenting a useful interface to a customer.

In other words,  something that mom and pop can use on their newly acquired Asus EE-PC and MacBook.

Good luck in trying to get people to right click on .pem, .der and other paraphernalia required to get a certificate installed on Windows.

Your best bet, unfortunately  is some kind of “client application” that makes things “easy”, such as Cisco’s or other third party supplicants. Boom, there goes most of your “plug and play” capabilities and “vendor independence”. I’d hate to see an Open Access layer2 network that requires me to authenticate with some muppets’ software that cannot run on Linux, for example.

This is aside from the fact, that the various OS’es built-in 802.1x clients will only support very specific flavours of EAP, and with _very_ specific attributes present in the cert.

The best implementation thus far is EAP-TTLS, which simply requires a username and password, as long as the AAA server is in the client’s trusted chain. This can be easily achieved by having your AAA cert signed by the big boys such as Verisign or Thawte, in a similar fashion to how SSL works.

Unfortunately it’s not supported by Windows, by default, again. EAP is a minefield. If you don’t believe me, just go read this and look at the varied support and implementations.

The bottom line is: Pick your choice of  EAP agony, or go home. Suddenly the Open Access network has become very “closed”, and getting Layer2 access has become more complicated than asking Telkom for a copper pair.

My view on joe’s Layer2: The summary

• 802.1x authenticated Layer2 access is a challenge, not just for the provider, but also the customer.
• Non-802.1x Layer2 access is an customer take-on and ISP switching maintenance nightmare.

It may sound like I’m knocking Joe’s Layer2 vision quite a bit. But I’m not. Really… It’s just the the reality of 802.1x has been so muddied with vendor specifics and “extensible” standards that it’s nigh impossible to implement 802.1x for everyone, which was the entire point behind 802.1x to start with.

The alternative, which is to provide Layer2 services without authentication, or some kind of manual provisioning or vendor-switch specific mechanism is er, well. Vendor specific, or labour intensive. It generally doesn’t allow me to dynamically choose the service provider trunk that I would like my “circuit” to be terminated in.

802.1x should have been the most elegant way to provide dynamic switching between ISP’ Layer2 access to a customer.  Except it isn’t. Maybe it will settle down some in the future. Right now, it’s a frigging nightmare. Personally, I shall wait for the battle of the EAP’s to present a winner.

I fucking hope that winner is EAP-TTLS.

Joe’s Layer3

Joe: “Anybody can sell IP traffic over this switch fabric.”

OK. How do we sell Layer3 over a switch fabric? Well, the selling part should be obvious.

Actually GETTING Layer3 access is another thing. The first step for a customer being getting an IP address.

On a generic (802.1x authenticated) Layer2 Ethernet network the client’s choice of obtaining an IP address is:

1. DHCPv4 the thing a dynamic address.
2. Statically Assign an IPV4 address via DHCP based on the MAC, or customer.
3. Have IPV6 autoconfiguration assign the thing (but hey, isn’t that the same as DHCP?)
4. Use something like PPPoE but Joe doesn’t want this ?

This is all great, and very “plug and play” if we’re talking DHCP, or IPV6 Autoconfig.

Clearly static assignments are a bad thing ™.  So let’s consider that 802.1x actually worked, and I’m trunked back into my ISP’s core, or access devices for customers.

How do I stop a nitwit from assigning an IP to himself that he’s not supposed to have?  The ISP needs a device, to do that. Something that snoops on the DHCP response/reply and makes sure that I cannot (from my MAC) use another IP address.Let’s assume that (most metro switches do this in any case).

The ISP switch, or terminate device now has to filter all traffic for my mac address to be source, and destination correct for the IP address assigned. Fair enough, that’s something that most decent metro switches can do, and the OpenAccess network operator simply trunks traffic from my Metro port to the ISP’s access switch.

Thus, there is traffic inspection required on this  device. It requires ISP switch to do L3 inspection, to enforce the all of these rules. So effectively it’s a layer3 device, or NAS, since it’s probably going to have to generate some RADIUS records as well, to account for traffic. Aside from that, in the case of static IP assignment to a customer, the device will probably also need to advertise my IP’s location to the ISP’s IGP via OSPF, or iBGP.

Dang this access device has become a router rather than a switch. In fact, it’s become a NAS in the traditional sense.

And I’ll bet that suddenly  it has all the scalability problems that a typical “NAS”, PPPoE concentrator, or other “access device” would have, due to the large amount of state, and inspection required.

Now,  let’s take it a step further. The customer doesn’t have a single IP, but perhaps an entire netblock that they want statically routed. They would also like redundancy, and load-balancing across multiple connections!

Oh god. DHCP fails miserably for that. And I’ve yet to see the device that can even implement these sort of things via a simple instruction from a AAA server, and a client device that has support for that kind of functionality.

I could carry on about the problems involved with simply using Ethernet as a DHCP or IP platform but I’d have to write another 50 posts. The bottom line is that the basic Layer3 situation mentioned here has some serious limitations.

We need something else, something that works, something that does more than just handle a single IP, and a single user.

PPP is not dead

PPP is sometimes referred to as “legacy”. In fact, PPP was RFC’ed in 1994.

My definition of “legacy” is “it fucking works”.

Whether it’s PPP over Ethernet, or PPP over GRE (pptp) or PPP over L2TP, or PPP over SoNet is irrelevant.

PPP as a baseline protocol has solved so many networking problems and supports so many features that “modern” ideas of network simply doesn’t support.

Taking enterprise Layer3 access principles and applying them to “circuits” for customers is like trying to take over the entire world with hotspots, walled gardens and DHCP.

PPP is not dead. It supports IPV6, Routed netblocks, bridging (can you say dynamic load-balanced VPLS?) , encrypted authentication, encrypted data transfer, load balancing, bonded, or multiple links. The list just goes on. Every single circuit based networking problem in the past two decades has in some sense been solved with PPP.

Windows, Linux, MacOS and a plethora of other operating systems all support PPPoE as a built-in. Every home “WAN” router I’ve seen supports PPPoE. Very few of them supports 802.1x. Even the most menial Cisco router supports PPPoE.

By the device count on just the above mentioned vendors, PPPoE certainly has a damned good application still in the real world. A market that cannot be ignored, not just from a pervasiveness perspective, but also from a functional perspective.

Layer2 “Pre-select”

The true  challenge for an Open Access network, is to allow the customer to do carrier “pre-select” for his Layer2 Service. This effectively gives them a “circuit” to their provider of choice.

This is what an Open Access network should provide.  ”Layer2 Preselect”. Take my frigging circuit and connect it to the carrier of my choice.

Joe’s case for the 802.1x and L3 DHCP style service is certainly one use-case, but it’s certainly something that is applicable to a general road warrior or home user. It’s based on Ethernet, and IP over Ethernet. That has it’s limitations.

The fact is that PPP is also a Layer2 protocol. PPPoE should be the second defacto Layer2 service provided by any Ethernet-based Open Access Network. To not do so would be suicidal from a business perspective. An OA network design should provide for PPP based “Carrier Preselect” as well as Ethernet based “Carrier Preselect”.

PPP is used on 3G/HSDPA networks, CDMA networks. These are “legacies” that one has to contend with in an Open Access network. Because nice as it may be to dream about, Ethernet isn’t yet everywhere, and there are simply many networking technologies where it doesn’t make sense.

Open Access networks MUST allow for Layer2 preselect. Period. From there on, the implementation should be left to the ISP. The preselect should cater for IP over Ethernet, or IP over PPP. Those are the two most pervasive technologies around.

How to implement PPP over Ethernet?

One of the many possible solutions is fairly simple to implement.

The default “unauthenticated” VLAN for any Metro-E switch that the Open Access network operates trunks through to every ISP that offers services on the OA network. ACL’s are configured to ensure that only PPPoE packets are allowed through this default VLAN, and only to the know MAC’s of the ISP’s PPPoE concentrators. In order to scale it, certain segments of the citywide Metro-E network are trunked back to the provider on different “circuits” or VLANS where they can decide to implement one BIG PPPoE concentrator, or many smaller ones.

Each ISP advertises it’s AC (PPPoE access concentrator) on this default VLAN. A customer wishing to use a specific ISP specifies his username, password, and AC-name, associated with the ISP.

He terminates on the ISP’s PPPoE AC. The ISP pays a per megabit rate for access to this VLAN to the OA operator.

To handle  Joe’s case, the Metro-E switches implement 802.1x. All 802.1X AAA requests are forwarded to the Open Access operators’ AAA servers, which makes a decision to forward the request to the ISP’s AAA based on the outer unencrypted anonymous identity of the Access-Request (which normally still contains the ISP’s domain)

The Open Access operator’s AAA forwards the Access-Request (and ensuing EAP conversations) to the ISP’s AAA, which authenticates the user and reply’s with an Access-Accept to place the user in the ISP’s “service vlan”.

The client DHCP’s and address and get’s his service.

This is but one possible implementation (on the PPPoE side) there are many other options including PPPoE proxy’s, relays, tunneling etc.

QED

An open-access network should provide and support as many industry standards as are possible. Simply providing Ethernet across a nation or Metro is not the entire picture of the solution. One has to consider all the possible use-cases, technologies, supported standards, nice-to-have standards, and their viability.

The fact is that a RADIUS authenticated username and password remains the simplest, most commonly supported standard across a whole range of technologies. How you “make it so” is the differentiator.

roelf Uncategorized

If you haven’t played Left4Dead, or Left4Dead2 or haven’t watched Dawn of the Dead, then you are simply silly.

I have never had so much fun in multi player online gaming as I’ve had since Left4Dead. Actually I did, in Tribes2. But that’s an era that’s passed.

“The Man Comes Around” song by Cash, is simply incredible. Especially when augmented by a view of the blood of lots and lots and lots of zombies sprayed on your computer screen.

Cash’s lyrics simply makes Armageddon sound like it’s the most romantic and enticing thing on earth. Johnny Cash’s covers are awesome. Honestly, I never thought I’d say that about some guy that lived and made music in an era I didn’t really know about.

“Hurt” is an unknown classic — so underground that you would probably only know about if you wore stockings, tape, and sported black hair in the early nineties, and lived underground and after midnight because it was the “right thing to do”. Or, maybe you bought lots of NiN albums because it was cool.

I did a lot of that — the wearing stockings thing at least… I was also a NightClubOwner. I still meet people in my professional life these days that bring that up and mock me. I wore stockings. I wore duct tape. They considered it weird. meh…. At least I have some stories to tell. They have… Oh, a few years wasted…

I simply look at those days as a seven year hobby. Non-profitable. But extremely enjoyable… It was the most memorable time in my life.

How many 38-year-olds can say they ran an alternative nightclub for 7 years? Fuck — it was my fantasy come true. And I didn’t even have to die the way that Lolly did with all that blood and bullets and shit…

Of course, there’s “Personal Jesus”, by Cash as well:

I can honestly say that by the time Johnny Cash died, he really completed the full, utter and true artistic depth that any artist could strive for.

A true legend. As are the artists he covered. Old learning from the new, and all that jazz…

roelf Uncategorized

One of of my first educational posts. Now, revisted.

Get some Fad Gadget.

roelf Uncategorized

Some more musical education.

Tristesse De La Lune, Queen of the Damned. Google it, get the mp3, buy it from wherever.

Then, get out your vampire outfit, dress up  and go and watch ALL of the Underworld movies (again).

If you haven’t, then in which bat cave have you been living?

roelf Uncategorized

I don’t generally refer to news articles on commercial news sites, even though the good old “biting the hand that feeds IT” is one of my favorite daily reads, and has been for more than 10 years.

This article, however was just a priceless win. The subtleties obviously escaped whichever news24 monger was at the helm that day, and simply googled “london 2012 logo”. That, or he/she was actually enough of a subtle bastard to use TheRegister’s version in the hope that nobody would notice…

Either way, it has absolutely made my day.

roelf Internet, Uncategorized funny, media, news24, wrong

roelf Uncategorized

I would like to personally thank the staff of all our brand-new peers at JINX, and the commitment shown by you. Neology thanks you for your efforts at JINX over the last 72 hours — for your support, quality technical skills, and willingness to make JINX a better place. It has been a pleasure working with you all. So far 12 peers means a 66% peering rate at JINX, and the final ones (bar the umentionable two) are simply a matter of logistics.

1.	198.32.142.27	AS 8674	NETNOD
2.	2001:478:142::22	AS 6083	POSIX-V6
3.	198.32.142.135	AS 36889	DotCoZa
4.	198.32.142.29	AS 6968	Uniforum
5.	198.32.142.33	AS 2018	TENET
6.	198.32.142.14/12	AS 27322	ISC-F Root
7.	198.32.142.26	AS 33762	iBurst
8.	198.32.142.21	AS 11845	Vox Telecom
9.	198.32.142.16	AS 42	Packet Clearing House
10.	198.32.142.17	AS 3856	Packet Clearing House
11.	198.32.142.25	AS 10474	MWeb
12.	198.32.142.22	AS 6083	POSIX

In total — 12 Peers  – less than 72 hours. That’s about a peer per 6 hours. In fact, the first 12 hours turned up the most of the local ones.

It was all as simple as finding a contact in the organisation and exchanging peering details and netblocks. Of course, has been settlement free as well, and Neology will continue to do so as long as it has capacity. And if we don’t have capacity we will endeavor to provide more capacity.

Thanks to all the new peers,  you are part of the drive that is going to make INX’es in South Africa a success in the current and future tense.

It makes sense to peer settlement free at JINX. It’s good for the local internet. Except if BGP and route-filters are rocket science, as is generally the excuse toted by the “unmetionables”.

Sanity check:

It’s actually cheaper for me to get transit to the “unpeerables” via Telkom, rather than attempt to negotiate their prohibitive local peering requirements and pricing. Thanks Telkom, you are my friend. True value for money! Oh wait. Doesn’t that defeat the entire point of JINX ?

Here’s the thing — I’m paying for the SAIX local transit, and the “umnetionables” are paying for it too. So, in the end — we all paid for SAIX transit. If we don’t peer via SAIX or JINX then it would have to go SAIX, or international. So — wouldn’t it just make sense to peer at JINX? Yeah. I thought so.

Finally, many thanks to Graham, and Regardt for “making it so”. And thanks for all the V6 work as well. Neology is probably one of the better connected V6 providers at the moment, simply due to our willingness to do V6. We are hoping to establish peering with all the remaining JINX participants at this point. Basic logistics and time-zone issues appear to be the most common issue. Not “peering” agreements.

To the “umentionables” (you know who you are) … Thanks for your “cooperation” and entirely ridiculous peering policies. o_O

roelf Uncategorized

Thanks to Ant Brooks’s intervention my  router at JINX is now powered and live. ISPA organisational efficiency at it’s best.

roelf Uncategorized

(unqualified post, since I’m relying on info from my employees)

So I’ve got a shiny new router  in at JINX, at 158 Jan Smuts Ave, Rosebank. JINX Central. The prime peering point for ISPA members.

We’re a new JINX Peer. My router is there, with 8 Gig ports. Awaiting BGP peering, and whatnot.

Except apparently my router  cannot be turned on,  because the JINX rack is out of POWER. Also, according to rumour we’re the first new JINX peer in nearly three  years.

Sigh.

roelf Uncategorized

To start off — A classic romantic song. Something to appease the brain with. Something to make you refocus. Something to make you forget about the noise in your life, and think about what’s important.

Honestly I cannot think of anything better than Andrew Eldritch (Sisters of Mercy) and the following song: “Under the gun”. Terri Nun is the girl doing backing vocals. Eldritch had a preference for hiring vocalists, guitarist and other band members in order to just make a single song. This did not make him popular all the time. But it certainly worked.

Eldritch was hard on his musicians. He is a perfectionist. Over the course of the Sisters’ existence he went through nine band members. Every video made was painstakingly constructed to his specification. It didn’t make him popular with his band members, but he rolled ahead regardless. And the results show. The man is a musical genius.

This educational post has got a bit of a “gothic” slant to it. Eldritch hated being labeled as goth, or for being labeled as the “father” of the genre.

And that — I have to agree with. Goth, is simply not a label. It is merely a dark state of mind that many people experience. Some of them longer than others. It is a lovely, dark, imaginative place to be. Every teenager should experience it in my mind. I still make space for that state of mind regularly. It puts perspective on the world.

Many parents freak out when their children “turn to the dark side”, but having had the experience, and being involved in the Gothic scene I can honestly say that the only thing that parents have to fear is themselves, and their prejudice.

I was classified “gothic” for a long time, but for me it was simply a state of mind. Not a “look”.

However, if you’ve never put on some tight leather pants, thrown on a loose fitting cotton shirt, struggled with your eighteen-up Doc Martins and applied some black nail varnish, and then proceeded to have some deep conversations about love, live and death over a bottle of wine — then you haven’t lived. It was not about the look. It was simply about the rebellion and romance of it all.

Apparently, when Sisters of Mercy opened for Depeche Mode, with “Ribbons”, they had to wait half an hour for the crowd to calm down. The embedded version of Ribbons below, is audio only since most of the liver versions on youtube are just really crap. Incoming!

If you don’t own “A slight case of Overbombing”, then about now would be the time to go Amazon it.

The next song is by “The 69 Eyes”. They’re a Finnish band, and epitomize everything in a modern  ”Goth” band. They’ve taken the Gothic genre, combined it with good quality music, and vocals without trying to be too pretentious.  Some of their older video’s such as “Wasting the Dawn” did have a bit too many girls “sowing the seeds” for my liking but the quality of their current music is a testament to their evolution.

I want hair like that fucking drummer!

“The Chair” — “The 69 Eyes”.

Finally, and this isn’t really gothic, but just brilliant musicianship.

Were you under the impression that Marilyn Manson was simply a talentless dolt, trying to impress teenagers across the world?

Wrong.

If Tim Skold, and an accoustic version of (gasp) Justin Timberlake’s song “What goes around comes around” does not impress you then I guess you’re a BeeGee’s fan. This cover clearly shows Manson’s vocal abilities. And of course there is simply no disputing Tim Skold’s capabilities as a musician, but that’s is worth a post on it’s own. This cover simply kicks the pants off the original. What are the chances of Justin Timberlake ever covering a Marilyn Manson song ? Hmm… Yeah. By the way this song was recorded in a radio station after an interview with Skold and Manson. Not shabby for an impromptu performance.

Marilyn Manson – accoustic cover of “What goes around comes around” by Justin Timberlake.

So, to tie up with the “interference” portion in the title of this post. To any would-be or current parent. Don’t interfere. Darkness is a fact of life. It’s better that your children get exposed to it, and learn how to deal with than to attempt to interfere by “hiding” it.

In the end, they’re going to find out the following:

“We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn’t have to stop there.’” — Dana Gould, via jwz.

roelf Uncategorized

Short post, whilst watching postgres doing it’s crap.  Musical education.

Music just makes the entire world so much more bearable when you’re watching a database removing defunct rows. Reducing “plumbing” data to single-key dbm hashes is just a performance win. But when you have some legacy to deal with, it’s not always that easy.

For all the young budding computer scientists and DBA’s out there: forget about “first normal form”. Forget about relational databases. Forget about anything you learnt during Comp.Sci. It’s all bullshit. The only way to scale is to consider your data as “disconnected”. Unconnected. No hard relations. If you need to relate, code is going to be more optimal in joining stuff that an RDBMS ever will be. Build systems that allows you easy, speedy access to the most relevant data, regardless of relationships.

Relational databases with referential integrity, and all the crap that goes with should be the domain of a good programmer as implemented in code. Not some half-baked entity relationship diagram produced by a poor DBA, with complex SQL queries to find out if “bob” is a “user” or a “customer”.

Build high-speed disjointed storage, forget about SQL “JOINS”. Build , and use high-speed distributed API’s, and queues using gearman, and whatever else the hell you fancy to retrieve and store your data — and only the data you need.

Devolve every storage issue into what it is – a storage issue. RDBMS is the evil of the 20th century. Hastables, and “flakey” relationships is the way to process thousands and millions of requests per second.

Using an RDBMS for anything more than a couple of rows  is just simply “insane”. In the membrain. You will go down the painful performance alley. And steer away from anything containing the tag “SQL”.

Unless all you’re writing is YEAFBS (yet another fucking blog system) based on some dumbass MVC framework. Cause then you’re good. Except, it will NEVER work in the real world.

As a furthering to musical and database education — watch Oomph “Augen Auf”

Augen Auf meaning – “Open Eyes”. Something an RDBMS will give you, but at a pedestrian pace. Partition your data. Store it in it’s most optimal fashion. Don’t worry too much about consistency. What matters is speed and ” relative” accuracy.

Oomph don’t allow embedding, but it certainly is is one of the best videos from Oomph.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YClJQBq4qpU

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Finally. Orgy – Blue Monday.

This is simpy one of the best covers of a classic 80’s song in a long time.The video is absolutely awesome too. It’s got nothing to do with databases or “first normal form”. Thank God.

roelf Uncategorized

Back when I worked for I-Net Bridge/Johnnic e-Ventures before the dot-com bubble I had a little Sun IPC SPARCStation at my disposal. It was one of the first machines that ran SparcLinux in South Africa, since I pretty much did a lot of the porting work for the peripherals myself.

I felt that music and audio streaming was the NEXT BIG THING, because I was also a partner in TheFridge (a nightclub). I researched audio streaming technologies. I pimped the little IPC with extra hardrives, and ran Apache, and a selection of seriously nasty perl scripts that could stream music. This little box was called http://beer.inet.co.za/ and it served for many years as the development team’s general testgrounds and the company’s internal fungrounds. We even ran an internal mailing list, and nntp server on the thing.

Of course, after management discovered the thing I was forced to shut it down,  due to it’s popularity, and supposedly dubious content.  I guess they didn’t appreciate me recreating a bad.attitude newsgroup ala JWZ.

I had to move my fungrounds to the interwebs. I started a series of “musical education” pages on an external webserver, and tried to replicate the fun that was had on beer.inet.co.za but it was just never the same. In fact, my http://rodent.za.net/me/ pages got me more takedown notices in a month than a badger sheds hair in a day.

So, in the spirit of something I did years ago, and with the “litigation free” hosting services of youtube.com, I present some more awesome music, and “musical education” albeit 8 years later.

With the advent of Youtube, I can now simply rescind all responsibility for content since I’m not hosting any of this… Haha!

I link largely for the music, not the videos.  Hence the small video format. I’m sure you know how to make it bigger. Clicky Clicky, Hacky Hack. It’s not rocket science.

Covenant

Covenant is easily one of the most underrated electro bands. I’ve been a fan since I ran TheFridge. Covenant’s lyrics are appealling, thoughtful, and (most) of their music is the angry kind of calm that can only be compared to Depeche Mode.

“Bullet” had one of the best videos for it’s age. The Anton Corbijn style shots and matrix-like effects were simply awesome. Bullet is a thoughtful ballad executed with skill and balance.

“Go Film” was simply a clone of the beats and ideas behind Depeche Mode’s “Photographic” but it was certainly executed in style as only Covenant can do. “Go Film” was a dance floor hit at the club for many months. I remember girls coming up to me in the DJ booth asking for more of that “dancy depeche mode”.

Bullet	Go Film

 

Carter – The Unstoppable Sex Machine

Welcome to Punk, Brixton, and the great british cockup. Punk. Punk was the eighties, the tailend of the nineties and overall just great. Rebellion, reality, guitaring, anger and great lyrics all rolled into one. Carter “The Unstoppable Sex Machine” was one of the great theatrical punk-brit bands that ended the final season of punkhood.

The first video “Surfin USM” will put everything about Carter USM into perspective. It is from their live concert in Brixton. If you think you’ve seen people mosh about to pedestrian songs such as “Nelly the Elephant” and thought it wild, then you have not seen how insane “Surfin USM” becomes on a dance floor.

The famous intro:  ”When you’re younger, you can eat what you like, drink what you like and still climb into your 26 inch waist trousers and zip them closed. When you reach that age, 24, 25,  your muscles give up, they wave a little white flag and without any warning at all you’re suddenly a fat bastard”. You fat bastard! You fat bastard!

Here’s the song continuing from the video:

 

Inspiral Carpets

“This is how it feels” – was covered by Carter the Unstoppable Sex machine. The Inspiral Carpets version is the best though… Just imagine driving down a long dark dirt road whilst on holiday in Stilbaai and shouting the lyrics at the top of your lungs.

This was one of the songs that expressed 400% of how I felt at the time, right after writing matric examinations, and fluxing in that space of “what the hell am I going to do now ?

roelf Uncategorized

Bear McCreary’s version of “All along the Watchtower” in the finale of Battlestar Galactica Season 3 is simply awesome. I have the albums. All of it. If ever there was a Scifi series with a perfect soundtrack – BSG was it.

If you have know idea what I’m ranting about at this late hour, then it’s probably the time to get educated on the original Bob Dylan version of the song too.

I apologize for the pointless youtube embedding just for delivering some audio, but apparently google gets away with more rights violations than I could. There is a point to my rambling…

Firstly — the Bear McCreary/Bt42 version:

Then — Bob Dylan version, overlayed into the closing of Season 3 of BSG.

If you don’t know what BattleStar Galactica is, then well… Let’s just leave it there.

So what’s this got to do with “All along the watchtower” ?

At the end of the day, I got to this point by contemplating what is happening with the Mobile Interconnect Rate, and ICASA, and government. I stumbled across the song, during a random trawl of my media collection, and felt that it was quite applicable to the current happenings in terms of regulation in telecoms.

Bob Dylan is a great balladeer, and the whole point of “All along the watchtower” is that it is in essence, a reverse, recursive song. “At the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again.”

We have been here before:

When ICASA drafted their hare-brained ADSL regulations in 2006, everyone thought it would be great, and broadband in South Africa would be on the upswing. Little did we know. The regulations simply indicated that ICASA has a near zero understanding of any subject matter on their plate. The nett result for ADSL subscribers have been an even more racketeered DSL and bandwidth market. Telkom still has a stranglehold over the local loop. Telkom has found nifty ways around regulations such as “Local bandwidth usage shall not be subject to the cap”.

More fail predicted:

ICASA has been hopelessly unsuccessful in regulating the tiny bit of legislation they have control over. The DoC has been a complete basket case for the last 10 years.

Now suddenly there is a hive of activity? Politicians are showing their teeth. The operators are running scared (there’s a 19% ‘negotiated’ drop!)

ICASA is still trying to fight their way out of the paper bag they created. I predict that any and all regulation around the Mobile Interconnect Rate will be as pointless and ineffective as the ADSL regulations were. This is simply due to the fact that ICASA,  and it’s councilors have simply no idea of the subject matter.

We are the union, and the watchers:

The bottom line is — who is watching the watchers ? They are clearly incapable of doing so themselves.

MyADSL, the consumer, and every disillusioned internet user has become the watchdog. The consumers are the watchers. And they’re not turning to malformed regulation anymore. They’re just publicising their frustrations on the internet. I believe that activism and opinion has done more for the broadband market than any well-intended governement regulation.

A marketing manager’s nightmare.

Well done all.

roelf Uncategorized

– or –

“What happens when the owner of a web design company reckons he’s got what it takes to be an ISP?”

On the 12th of October, a new “ISP” called Social Flu Internet launched with great fanfare, and  got  great coverage on MyADSL, under the heading “ADSL: R 8 per GB local, R 35 per GB blended”

A lot of people, including the MyADSL editorial team considered this too good to be true. This is understandable, seeing that they offered local-only@R8/Gb, and shaped@R35/Gb, and unshaped@R45/GB, when the retail price from SAIX for unshaped bandwidth is still above R100/Gb (didn’t the ADSL regulations cover port prioritisation?)

As it turns out it was a scam perpetrated by Social Flu Media’s “Internet” division. Kudos to Rudolph Muller of MyADSL for asking the difficult questions, and doing the investigation.

Of course most people that  know just a smidgeon about the industry knew that things were just “not right”.

SAIX resale structures:

Apparently, Social Flu Internet was simply a reseller of another “upstream” company’s bandwidth. Put into perspective it simply means that SocialFlu signed up with someone like Datapro, Axxess, Web Africa, or the various ISP’s that have invested in RADIUS infrastructure, as a “reseller” and received their own realms based on the “upstream” company’s wholesale agreement with SAIX.

SAIX, will not allow a company to resell their bandwidth unless they are a registered VAN, or ECS holder. This has however, left a nice niche, where ECS/VANs license holders tend to sign up “resellers” under their overall wholesale agreement with Telkom/SAIX and allow the reseller to register their own “realms” under the auspices of the wholesaler. Of course, the ECS/VANs license holder is completely liable for all usage of the realms under it’s auspices.

Social Flu’s “upstream wholesaler” hadn’t billed them since 2005.  This is a practically inexcusable fault from the wholesaler, but fortunately only to their own demise.

The reality is, that if someone offers you SAIX bandwidth they are reselling SAIX bandwidth. And whining about whether Axxess, is better than Datapro, or MWeb, or @lantic is pointless. They’re all reselling the same thing. They’re reselling a username, and a password, and gettting charged the standard rate from SAIX.

Other than that, they have very little control. It’s like signing up for a Vodacom, MTN, or Cell-C cellular package through Nashua Mobile. You just hope that Nashua Mobile’s administration and support is better.

Fraud — “I perpetrate you”:

Social Flu’s owner — Enrico Rausa’s  behaviour,  after having cottoned on to the fact that his upstream isn’t charging him for services is simply tantamount to fraud. He launched SFI’s offerings at prices so low that he would NEVER be able to pay his “upstream” bill, but he simply depended on the lackadaisic billing from his upstream  to offer him some leverage in the market.

Honestly, I don’t know what he thought he would accomplish, or whether nothing would happen, but let’s face it… If someone in the DSL market offers pricing below what other ISP’s reselling Telkom/SAIX does then “difficult questions” are going to be asked.

As it turned out,  apparently his “upstreams” asked the difficult question, and decided to investigate their records. Lo and behold they came across a an account that hadn’t been charged from their billing system since 2005.

Enrico’s retort to MyADSL questions was: “We tried something, it backfired. Send me to the gallows if you want. It is time people took a stand against the big people.” is even more inexcusable.  It’s a bit thick there on the gallows thing..

According to him – he did nothing wrong, and what went wrong is that he got caught out. Naturally Afrihost’s recent R29/Gb marketing scheme assisted in people buying into the SFI’s marketing, since it really seemed possible that prices could be dropped, and everyone has been expecting it.

SAIX resale — the facts:

SAIX charges standard rates to everyone as resellers in the market. If someone offers you SAIX quality bandwidth below the well-known  cost prices of local-only@ R19/Gb, shaped@R49/Gb or unshaped@R119/Gb then you have to consider it to be dubious. If SAIX changes their wholesale price,  then most  SAIX resellers such as  Axxess, WebAfrica and MWeb’s prices will change.  Some of them appear to be “beter” in the market by selling below cost, but not by a big margin.

If a single SAIX resellers’ price changes, then so will everyone’s. Telkom will by lynched otherwise. So anything that you see in the market, in terms of pricing is simply the loss, or gain that the ISP is willing to make, based on the basic wholesale price. Some of them will be clever and will use statistics and modelling to make sure that their price point still allows them a profit based on the fact that most users don’t overrun their CAP.

The only companies that have some modicum of fixed  control over their base  costs, are companies that subscribe to SAIX/Telkom’s IPConnect service, which is charged per Mbps (speed), instead of per Gigabyte (volume). This is basically Internet Solutions, Verizon/MTN, FNB Connect, and recently WebAfrica.

This allows ISP’s  to terminate (in a very crippled fashion) their own ADSL sessions, and provide their own international and local bandwidth. However, with SAIX/Telkom’s prohibitive IPConnect pricing, there isn’t really much space to play with in terms of pricing either,  because even on IPConnect the base cost per Gig s are so much more than SAIX itsself has to pay. Yes. TelkomInternet  itsself doesn’t pay IPConnect fees. Every ISP does. Competition Commision investigation results are “imminent”

The cunning ISP however, knows how to optimise this kind of infrastructure, even against the insane disadvantage of TelkomInternet, whilst still providing a good quality service. Social Flu wasn’t even close to this. In fact, it didn’t even reach the check-out counter of Checkers. Ok, maybe it did. But it didnt’ have change.

I don’t really know how people believed in their capability to innovate, or be the “killer in the market”. Believe you me — it is way more complicated than the ADSL forumites tend to make it out to be every day…

Afrihost R29/Gb – “The catalyst”?

The reality is that, yes, a catalyst such as Afrihost’s R29/Gb offering is certainly  stimulating competition. But when analyzing the fundamentals (of which I have a very firm grasp) anyone with half a brain will realize that some business models simply aren’t sustainable, and that, simply is why most ISP’s haven’t dropped their prices. Because in 99% of cases, their upstream (SAIX) hasn’t changed their prices.

SAIX is bargaining on the fact that for most ISP’s it will simply be easier and more economical to resell access on the SAIX network, that it would be to actually get their own AS Numbers, IP space, peering arrangements and international access.

Gian Visser of Afrihost has clearly done some good statistical analysis, and some risk analysis. Afrihost “might” make it, if their userbase is big enough after the R29/Gb marketing stunt to at least break even. That’s sustainable if you can keep the costs down.

One has to also consider the additional value-added service revenue Afrihost may have gained from a “mass signup” with such a good marketing campaign. Perhaps it might even be marginally profitable… Sustainable? I’m not so sure.

I have personally bought an Afrihost 5GB account, and have killed it within the first three days of every month. Actually, I triple-killed it three times, because Afrihost, and their upstream Internet Slowlutions didn’t realise that one of the two  SAIX POD (packet of disconnect) RADIUS servers was out of comission for nearly a week.

Afrihost is certainly not going to make any money out of me, and I doubt Gian Visser will — out of this whole “buyology” scheme — in the long run.

Afrihost’s upstream — Internet Solutions will always be on the winning side because they know how to manage bandwidth (ok, perhaps that’s giving them too much credit), and they have fixed costs in terms of connectivity and IPConnect. Afrihost will always be on the “low-margin” – “high-volume” end of the game.

The  moment Afrihost tries to do something else,  Internet Solutions will pull the proverbial “cunt” on them in terms of peering, local access, etc. Just as they have with every ISP smaller than them, that grew into a peer or “threat”.

MWeb’s TV advertisements attract the kind of customers who don’t overrun their CAP’s. Marketing on MyADSL in the other hand attracts every tom-dick-and-harry that will eat their bandwidth simply because they can.

I’m not so sure you’ll be able to keep your R29/Gb promises. Believe me  – the day you can’t I will be there to call you…

The social flu fallout:

As usual, there was lots of whining on MyADSL. Lessons were learnt. Probably not enough…

This is all similar in vein as the previous “free proxy server” fraud stuff I reported on.

I also predict that there is a  set of offices in The Colloseum, Century City, Cape Town to be evacuated  in the next few weeks as well. Some customers probably lost money. An “upstream provider” definately lost money.

They tainted my surname!

What pisses me off the most about the Social Flu saga is that my surname “Diedericks” is mentioned in the article: According to Social Flu Internet Marketing Manager Gareth Diedericks, he was shocked when he found out how the business was run.

“The calm attitude shown by Enrico after the scam report made me firmly believe that everything was above board. I am still amazed at how this turned out… I really thought that this was legit and even believed that I was going to become very wealthy,” said Diedericks.“Thank you to MyBroadband for bringing this to light. I dread to think what may have happened to me or my family should this not have been discovered and Social Flu grew.”

Get rich out of reselling SAIX bandwidth? What a dumbass marketing droid… The market is saturated. The room for maneuverability is nearly nil. It’s like trying to enter the market as Cell-D. Oh but wait. Gareth didn’t actually have a clue about what he was selling, or what it really was, or how it worked, or ANYTHING.

You clearly missed the  Diedericks gene-pool-meeting where we handed out brains and common sense.

Or perhaps it was just a simple way for Gareth to cop out of something he really knew was happening. Kudos for resigning. I hope you have better luck selling insurance policies or something.

A scrape-ing-of the silicon?

“If you can think it, we can create it!” says Social Flu Media’s contact page.

Uh, yeah. How’d that work out for you?

Of course, for me to mention that Enrico,  and Gareth come from Roggebaai/Century City in Cape Town (as per co.za and other sources) might be a bit insensitive, and biased considering my recent diatribe against Silicon Cape, but then again…

Without further ado here is Social Flu Internet/Media’s swansong:  DoosDronk!

“Party, party, party” Courtesy of “Die Antwoord”

roelf Uncategorized broadband, myadsl, pratt, silicon scrape, social, web2.0

Andrew Thomas-Woolf, was probably one of the few people whose comments about my “Sillycon Scrape” post hit the right strings with me. Thanks for engaging Andrew, and I have to say that your words has left some lingering thoughts.

I agree that the Cape and it’s lifestyle has much to offer, and that it definately has a great many attractions for “the right” people. I never disputed this. I like your Cape. I don’t necessarily like all the fscktards living in it.

What I disagree with Thomas about,  is that South Africa has too small a market to “attract” venture capital. Reason: You’re thinking about just South Africa!

The entire Silicon Cape initiative is  soooo South African focused.  Hello. We live on a continent.

It’s called Africa. I’ts fairly big.

Andrew said:

Our economy is just plain and simply too small. A 20% penetration rate on say 4 million Internet subscribers at R200 total lifetime value per customer == R160m or US$20m.

This is just such a typical  SillyconScrape way of looking at things. Certainly,  if you’re trying to build another Web2.0 company this is the case. The market is small.  But Information Technology is certainly not limited to Web2.0 startups and doing business in the global internet economy. Unfortunately, this is all that SiliconCape appears to care about.

Infrastructure is where IT’s at:

There are many opportunities in Africa in that does not align with the “Youtube/Facebook/Web2.0″ sphere of Information Technology. Just because Social Media is currently the “big thing” on the internet, does not mean that Africa has the access to it, or the opportunity for business in it.

Africa needs IT infrastructure before it can enter the blogosweer.

And that is the venture capital problem that REALLY exists. Very few venture capitalists want to invest in infrastructure, because it’s not exciting enough or in their mind doesn’t “promise” enough return.

On the other hand funds earmarked for infrastructure all over Africa is being misapplied by the largely corrupt governments  in charge of said funding on initiatives that are too driven by hype and marketing than anything else !

Africa NEEDS basic infrastructure:

How are we ever going to eradicate the information poverty that exists within Africa ? What about telecommunications, data centers and the real nuts and bolts that makes IT work ? What about PCs for people? You need ROADS before you can have INDUSTRY. How are we going to address that poor “Internet penetration rate” ?

Perhaps if we focused on upping our “penetration rate” in South Africa, we’d have more venture capital. News24.co.za certainly seems to be able to profitably cater to a “very poorly penetrated” community. Ach, enough about sex then…

It appears that all the Silicon Cape is interested in, is in what the REST OF THE WORLD WANTS, and not what Africa NEEDS, because basic infrastructure like connectivity, computing facilities and the rest is simply not exciting enough for most people. “It’s droll”. It’s “plumbing”. I know a lot of rich plumbers though…

The opportunity I see, and have have a passion for is Africa. Not the “rest-of-world”. There are a great many opportunities north of the South African borders, yet unrealized and waiting to be picked. Opportunities that can make money, and on top if it make a difference.

Basic infrastructure DOES make money:

What Africa needs is virtual roads. Of course, that’s just simply not exciting enough for Venture Capital… However companies like Altech seem to be making a KILLING in this industry. Why ? Because they don’t take the short-term venture capitalists view. They know a lot about basic economics and ignore Seth Godin-like economics like the “long tail”. Even heavyweights like Dimension Data seems to have caught on to this fact.

My company is aligned with this African view. And I’ll tell you straight, it’s hard to do business “up there”.

We struggle on a daily basis to keep our customers happy, to understand contracts written in Arabic, French, and other languages. But the reality is that there is simply no better country, populous, or  skill-set better than South Africans geared to doing business in Africa. We understand the continent. We live on it. We breathe it.

Idealistically, basic infrastructure is  where I’d rather be involved. I was born African, and have a passion for remaining African. I certainly do not have a passion for becoming the next “Intellectual Property” export of South Africa. I have a passion for providing Internet services in Zanzibar, Lagos, Nairobi —  and for applying technology in a way that makes a difference to people.

I don’t even have a facebook account, because I consider it stupid. Facebook is not infrastructure. It’s the Internet  equivalent of an annoying tea-party with a bunch of people you’d rather call fuckwits.

It appears that the SillyconScrape  is more interested in wasting venture capitalists  money and enriching themselves. Because they can tote the success of Facebook, and others. Oh wait, perhaps that’s premature. Facebook isn’t actually profitable yet.

Conclusion:

I guess my problem  is that what I’ve seen about SillyconCape is that in  it’s entirety it simply misses the point of Africa, and focuses on the rest of the world and the global internet, when the reality of Information Technology on this content is abysmal.

I predict that the next company to make it “big” in this continent will be the company capable of doing business in Ki-Swahili.  MX-It in Ki-Swahili anyone?

My roadmap to success, is based north of our borders in this content, rather than across the Atlantic or Pacific.  Supplying Internet plumbing.

It’s a completely untapped market, and as MTN and others have shown, ready for the picking. Competition is low, revenues are high, and the ability to get entrenched is phenomenal.

I guess it just doesn’t fit with what SillyconScrape fanboys sees as “Information Technology”.

To end this post I could have quoted from Vinny’s presentation: ”Yes We Can!” But that would have just been cliche, and  I don’t do that kind of crap.

Honestly, I’d rather just fall back to the great British morons:

“Let’s just get ON with it dear…”

roelf Uncategorized

I’ts lovely that some of our country’s useless politicians presided over a function to promote the Cape as “Silicon Cape”.

However, innovation and invention also happens here, in Johannesburg — “amazing doll!”.

I think in Joburg it’s just more the accepted norm than “something amazing”. Perhaps that’s why fancy banners aren’t slapped onto web2.0 businesses in an attempt to attract venture capital, because quite honestly every single investor I’ve talked to are looking at business fundamentals and not the badge.

From what I can see the soon-to-be-immolated-in-silicon-cape  has come up with  SynthaSite (ohwaitzors that’s called Yola now) (didn’t geocities try this and fail?) and a Fon-like  scheme trying to monetize Wi-Fi hotspots,  and an even grander scheme to reinvent Youtube in a bandwidth starved country.  I wish the initiative luck, and lots of mountain. Then again,  frogfoot do rock so there must be some brains in Cape Town. In fact, it must be so, because many of my previous colleagues have immigrated there…

Blogs, “Web 2.0″ apps and the like was OFN in the year 2000 when the bubble burst. I really don’t see the reason for the excitement now. I had a web-2.0 style framework more complicated than prototype, jquery, mtools and and scriptaculous built for a web-based application delivering real-time data in 2004 already. Oh, and I had paying customers.

Why does every brand new MVC based framework out there still have a “blog” as the primary example of the efficacy of the framework? Is this what computing has driveled down to?  Blogs ?

Honestly — trying to flag a single city in South Africa as “silicon” just because a lot of people living in it tend to blog, and build RSS based aggregators does not mean that it invents stuff. RSS, XML feeds, content aggregation — it’s been done. All the Silicon Cape appears to be doing is refining it, and putting well-designed badges on it.

Call me sour. Call me whatever you want, but please don’t label the Cape as if it’s something new and fancy, or “the mother of invention”.

Try and build something innovative, that requires scaling, and challenge the problems before claiming that a city filled with developers is the new Silicon Valley. Do something really innovative. Like. Let’s say… Something that HASN’T been done before. Repeat it. Make it a success. Monetize it.

Politicians take note — if you want to incentivise innovation, technology and the overly-used term “ICT Development” how about giving technology companies a tax break, stop charging insane provisional taxes on profits not yet realized, and unbundle the local loop already… Perhaps then, successful businesses would want to put people into apprenticeships, and innovation and development could really happen. Perhaps — THEN, we could develop into an information society.

I have nothing against the Cape. Sounds like a marvelous lifestyle, and I certainly wouldn’t mind to live in Cape Town.

In my mind “SiliconSA” sounds a lot better…

Invention and innovation is a mindset –not a fucking geographical location.

—

roelf Uncategorized cape town, not invented here, scrape, sillycon

Seven years ago, when I still worked as the Internet Architect for I-Net Bridge, a company distributing Market Data (real-time stock information and news) in the South African market, I went to my boss, Paul Septhon and said that we had to extend the real-time messaging layer (IML) to include ASCII style messages so that it could be easily integrated into I-Net’s web delivery platforms.

IML (I-Net Bridge Messaging Layer) as it was called at that point, was a publish/subscribe real-time messaging layer for distributing I-Net’s real-time data to it’s customers, from various data sources such as the JSE, Bridge, Dow-Jones and the London Stock Exchange.

The problem was that the publisher and subscriber API’s were extremely event-driven, using callbacks and largely implemented using C, or C++. When it came to developing our web applications it became a problem to integrate a call-back driven, and binary-transport focused system into web applications that are typically “request-get-forget” style systems.

Thus, was invented “CABS” aka “Common Application and Backoffice System”. CABS predated service-oriented architecture and distributed systems that we are seeing now, by about 6 years. Using the existing reliable binary-focused publish/subscribe system that was IML, I-Net developed a scalable ASCII-protocol based client/server architecture that makes things like gearman look like amateur attempts.

The system support load-balanced function calls, a complete directory-like tree structure, mount points for various publishers and a plethora of client and publisher interfaces, including TCL, php, Perl and C/C++.

Data could be accessed transparently in the entire “data” tree, with full ACL based permissions required by the underlying IML layer, thus limiting the access of data by clients only to publishers that they subscribe to. Publishers could then implement finer grained access control. We proceeded to implement one of the most feature rich, web-based MDDS syndication and publishing systems in South Africa based upon this architecture.

It was a phenomenal achievement and I reckon, one of the grandest in South African development history, considering the time, the recent .com bubble bursting and everything that ensued post-that. We even implemented user-authentication and statistics gathering using this architecture. We had about 8 Apache based-linux front-end servers, communicating with the “cloud” of distributed data publishers across multiple geographic locations.

The front-end apache’s were mod_perl and HTML::Mason scripts that talked to the publisher’s with a simple ASCII style protocol. The HTML::Mason components used aggressive memcached caching in order to scale our performance.

Nowadays, I hear about “Web 2.0″ startups, and dig into the architecture and system used, and have not found anything approaching the implementation we had at I-Net Bridge.

Until, today I came across gearman. Having been a memcache and danga.com fan for many years, I was surprised to see — finally, something that resembles the original I-Net Bridge CABS.

Gearman, is very simple, based on a simple job submission client, “mnemonic function” based job-router (gearmand) and hooks up to a bunch of “workers” that actually do the work.

In terms of architecture it focuses on the basics, redundancy, scalability and leaves all the rest of the complicated stuff such as the actual handling of access-control and marshalling of data as a “undefined contract” between the publisher and subscriber. Gearman simply handles the distribution, and reliable queuing of tasks and responses. It doesn’t even have client authentication! Those, I can work around fairly easily…

It is nowhere near as complicated as CABS was (nor do I think it will ever be) but having waved a sad good-bye to an amazing system at I-Net Bridge, I’m glad to finally find something that allows me to build some systems on a common distributable platform. I’ve been fiddling with PHP beans, UDP-based broadcasting of requests queues and various other solutions for Neology’s carrier-grade caching, RADIUS and billing systems, and I’m glad to have finally found some replacement “glue” to get everything together again in a consistent fashion.

I intend to use gearman for everything, including pinging my desktop

roelf Uncategorized cloud, i-net bridge, market data, ofn, real-time, reinvention, siliconcrap

Joachim Witt. If it’s the only new artist to ever get introduced into your limited repertoire… Ever. Please, just listen to him. I can’t directly link to the man’s music, nor do want to “induce you” to download  it. But buying just him, is a mission impossible.

But worth it.

I have a taste for German Neue Deutsche Harte,  Bauhaus, and   Architecture… And Joachim Witt is simply where it all started, musically, and genre-wise.  I  will not comment about the german girls playin guitar, since there is no need. It “augments”.

On top of the usual video artistry (did Anton Corbijn direct this video?) ,  Joachim Witt is a master of song, reinvention across decades, a depiction of reality, and a whimsical reflection upon the 80’s, life and 42.

Amongst my genre-favortite bands such as Rammstein, Kraftwerk, and Oomph, and Wolfsheim you will find that Joachim Witt has been the “grandfather”. The literal inventor of NDH. You may want to listen to the REALLY 80’s versions of the songs, and reflect where German NDH has come from and where it’s gone.

Joachim Witt tracks to search for:

1. Batallion D’amour
2. Goldener Reiter
3.  Weh-Oh-Weh.

I used to directly link  to  my “http://rodent.za.net/me/” which had some samples and a wiki-like description of my “Musical Education”  pages before, but all it got me was take-down notices. Funny that I can link to the youtube video’s without problems…

I’m sure that 90% of the bands  I used to “educate” people  with  would have actually appreciated the attention.

Oh well. Welcome to new-age media. Where the artist wins… Or NOT.

roelf Uncategorized education, me, musical

If, like me, you were brought up in Pretoria, South Africa then you most likely encountered loads of camping trips endowed upon you by your parents in the misguided belief that it would be “fun for everyone”. Aside from the fact that camping is of course, cheap. For me, at the time it felt that all we were doing is visiting boring after boring, dusty after dusty venue with nothing to do but read.

If, like me, you were also forcefully endowed into the abysmal system of slavery that was called ‘conscription’ in the South African National Defence Force, you probably encountered other kinds of “camping” trips that made the experience from childhood seem like a walk in the park.

All of this, instilled in me a complete sense of dread and adversity whenever camping was involved. Over the last years of my adulthood, I’ve simply shunned all forms of camping as “sub-human”.

So, here I am 20 years later, having actually enjoyed a camping trip. Vincenzia’s requirement for her 32nd birthday was a simple one, yet for me (initially) nearly unachievable due to my preconceptions.

She wanted an “adventure”. With Ruben now at the age of seven, and really having developed into a true rascal, my years of shying away from camping was bound for an overhaul. Besides, I’d actually bought a tent about a year ago so with the idea that Ruben could have some fun with it.

So, Ruben and I google’d mom’s secret adventure, and landed onto the website of Hartebeespoort Oord, camping and otherwise average-looking resort.

Aside from the fact that there was a (apparently unsuccesful) Christian Rock concert scheduled for the entire weekend (have you _ever_ heard of something as oxymoronical as Christian Death Metal?) the weekend was a blast. Ruben used his scooter in the pretty impressive skate park, we played mini-golf, swam for hours in the heated pool, and just generally relaxed.

I stuck to a few basic rules though:

1. Go prepared. In fact, go overprepared.
2. Go somewhere where there is LOTS of green grass.
3. Go somewhere where there is LOADS of things to do for a 7 year old kid.
4. Limit the damage by going somewhere close, and only going for one night (grin).

In all, it’s turned out  to be a complete blast (again, aside from the Christian Death metal).

I guess sometimes  you have to “get out of it”  a little bit in order to appreciate things back at home, and to see what the rest of the world is doing.  It also takes you out of your comfort zone, away from the drudgery, and just this  simple act, of 36 hours  has taken nearly a million miles off my stress-ridden shoulders. Vincenzia was entirely delighted with the birthday “present” and has already started planning another million trips I’m sure…

I might try this again, in a few months time. Time to start un-turtling… (Thanks Joe). If only there was a site somwhere on the interweb’s where people could rate their experience truthfully. Hmmm. Maybe I shoudld consider registering the24trip.co.za …  ;)

roelf Uncategorized camping, reality

So I just spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon with a couple that Vincenzia knows through her pottery connections and socially.

They made a date with us for an evening during the week (which I cancelled due to flu) and they then rescheduled for Sunday afternoon tea, i.e. Today. We were quite excited, finding people that we have some reasonable connection with is not a simple task.

She (of the couple) mentioned when scheduling the meet, that that they wanted to talk to us about a “business opportunity” which we (quite gratifyingly) put off until AFTER we had had our quiche, and coffee on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I’d been highly suspect of the whole event beforehand because of the “secrecy” and lack of “wanting to talk about it, until we see you”.

Of course, I’ know how these things go. After quiche and tea, we sat on the porch to listen to “the thing”.

Started off talking about “passive income”. It took ALL my might not to roll my eyes and freak out.

Eventually once we got to the point of “being part of a big company that distributes products and makes lots of money”.  I asked… “So, is it Amway?”

It was indeed…

So that was the end of a nice afternoon, with a couple (in the IT industry _nogal_). I politely indicated that they should stop talking and, very surprised, asked: “Why? What’s bad about Amway?”

If I had the time, or the inclination, I would have gone down the rabbit hole, but in the interests of my ulcer, irritable bowel, and general stressed-out-ness I just indicated that I have not, could not, ever be a “merchant” of wares.

The rest of the afternoon carried on under strained conversation and I quite honestly could not wait to show them the door.

How to screw up what could have been a nice friendship? Try to sell Amway. And that’s why it works. Because 90% of people feel so uncomfortable being accosted that they agree to “sign up”, or buy “stuff” simply to make everyone and their verbalised dreams happy.

What a crock of …

Die Amway…  Die… Die American sales dream. Die… This is Africa.

roelf Uncategorized