Researchers Find Way to Boost WiFi Performance 400-700 Percent

Is this just bringing switching tech to a shared medium? Nonetheless interesting:


WiFi hotspots in locations such as airports and large conventions frequently experience poor performance in terms of downlink goodput and responsiveness. We study the various factors responsible for this performance degradation. We analyse and emulate a large conference network environment on our testbed with 45 nodes. We find that presence of asymmetry between the uplink/downlink traffic results in backlogged packets at WiFi Access Point’s (AP’s) transmission queue and subsequent packet losses. This traffic asymmetry results in maximum performance loss for such an environment along with degradation due to rate diversity, fairness and TCP behavior. We propose our solution WiFox, which (1) adaptively prioritizes AP’s channel access over competing STAs avoiding traffic asymmetry (2) provides a fairness framework alleviating the problem of performance loss due to rate-diversity/fairness and (3) avoids degradation due to TCP behavior. We demonstrate that WiFox not only improves downlink goodput by 400-700 % but also reduces request’s average response time by 30-40 %.

http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/wms-gupta-wifi/

Dropbox alternatives

At this moment I enjoy the sharing and storing possibilities of my Dropbox account and since I got my HTC one S the amount of available storage increased to 25Gb (for 2 years). I share documents and files with my wife, family and friends. We use it for sharing files between members of our local Scouting club, etc.. And even with it's ease of use it's not enough to silence that nagging feeling: it's not your own storage.
When I find the time I think i'm going to do testsetup of Owncloud. It's free and it runs on your own server/storage.

http://owncloud.org/

For those seeking a cloudstorage option for Windows and Linux (no Mac support yet), try Ubuntu One. It gives 5 Gb instead of the free 2Gb at Dropbox.

https://one.ubuntu.com/

When speaking of cloudstorage I feel obliged to mention one of the granddadies of cloudstorage (before we started calling cloud to anything remote or a bunch of servers together) : iFolder. Developed at Novell, released in 2001 and now a open source project.

http://ifolder.com/ifolder

FreeBSD - OpenLDAP and FreeRADIUS part 2

The OpenLDAP server is running and now I have to implement the design for the directory I want to use. Before I can start entering all ou,dc,cn-info I'm going add a password for the slapd-daemon and generate a hash for in the slapd-config file. There are several hash-schemes for the password but I'm going to use the MD5-hash:

slappasswd -h {MD5}

This command asks for a password and after entering one, it generates a hash.

New password:
Re-enter new password:
{MD5}1iB8sGXpjoNB5Ra2copmjQ==
[root@fbsd-radius ~]#

Copy this hash, we're going to need it later