Dan Siemon

Tag: Internet

  • Small Providers and Network Neutrality

    It appears that Network Neutrality will be dealt a severe blow at the FCC soon. Although some smaller ISPs are supportive of this change, I believe that it represents a major threat to the long term health of the small ISP industry. I love small ISPs. A long time ago I owned one, I’ve worked…

  • Why The Internet Only Just Works

    Why The Internet Only Just Works A paper which provides an overview of some of the problems in the Internet architecture.

  • BBR Congestion Talk is Online

    A talk describing Google’s new TCP congestion control algorithm, BBR, is now online. Such a beautiful and simple solution to a long standing problem. This one of those situations when you have to wonder why this wasn’t done before. On a related note, it’s interesting how BBR separates the retransmission and congestion control (rate) logic.…

  • Book: An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking

    A while ago the Packet Pushers had Geoff Huston on as a guest in the future of networking series. There are lots of good ideas and contrarian opinions in that podcast episode – go listen to it. During the episode, Geoff mentioned a book that had a big influence on him called An Engineering Approach…

  • Book: The Art of Network Architecture

    I recently finished reading The Art of Network Architecture. If I remember correctly, I found out about this book during an episode of the Packet Pushers where the author participated. I ordered the book based on the promise of discussion of SDN use cases and SDN networking in general. It turns out that this wasn’t…

  • Detecting Failure

    Part 1: Internet Redundancy, Or Not Part 2: Redundant Connections to a Single Host? In the last post I discussed how devices like your laptop and mobile phone are computing devices with multiple Internet connections not all that different from a network with multiple connections. The anecdote about Skype on a mobile phone reconnecting a…

  • Redundant Connections to a Single Host?

    Part 1: Internet Redundancy, Or Not Previously I wrote about how true redundancy for Internet connections is only available to Internet providers and very large enterprises. This post continues from there. I would guess that the fact that it’s not possible to get redundant Internet access is a big surprise to people who haven’t look…

  • Internet Redundancy, Or Not

    Imagine you are a business that wants to have redundant connections to the Internet. Given the importance of an active Internet connection for many businesses this is a reasonable thing for an IT shop or business owner to ask for. One could also consider the serious home gamer who can’t risk being cut off as…

  • My Linux Journal article is now available

    My article on Packet Queueing in the Linux Kernel appeared in the July 2013 issue of Linux Journal. Now that a month has past, Linux Journal’s great copyright policy allows me to post the content. You can find the full article at the URL below. Queueing in the Linux Network Stack

  • Improving my home Internet performance

    For a long time I’ve experimented with shaping my upstream traffic via Linux’s traffic management functionality (tc command) with the goal of improving my Internet connection’s performance. The latest incarnation of this configuration can be found in this script. Anecdotally this configuration greatly improves interactive performance. Use cases such as Skype calls work without a…