Category: Uncategorized

Windows Notebooks No Longer Fit For Their Purpose In Meetings

A quick observation today about people coming to meetings with their tablets rather than their Windows based notebooks. So far my crude analysis was that those are the people in companies that mostly need a screen to access and consume information. To them, a keyboard for typing in longer texts quickly and efficiently is a rather optional thing, especially in meetings. But there is one more thing Windows notebooks like to do, especially if they are centrally administered: Not do what you want, especially when you use them to present something during a meeting.

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KVM/Qemu vs Virtualbox for my Cloud at Home

Virtual machines in GUIAfter telling my story about upgrading and virtualizing my cloud at home in a previous post, I thought I’d follow-up on the story with some technical details on my new implementation. After deciding to migrate the services I host at home such as Nextcloud, Selfoss, OpenVPN, etc., into virtual machines, the big question was which virtualization environment to use.

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A Fast Filesystem For My Cloud at Home: Mapped vs. VirtIO

As I store quite a lot of data on my Nextcloud at home, it was clear to me when setting-up my new virtualized system at home that I did not want to store the data in the virtual disk image that holds the system partition. If I ever need to migrate the VM or need to extend the storage space, the last thing I want to do is to fiddle with the system partition. KVM/Qemu offers a number of different ways to map additional storage into a virtual machine and surprisingly, the performance of the different options differ quite significantly!

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The 5G Core – Part 5 – The Divorce of Registration and Session Management?

One thing that astounded me when reading the 4G specs for the first time many years ago was that there was no separation anymore between attaching (registering) with the network after power-on and activation of a default bearer (getting an IP address). It looks like this will change again in the 5G core network.

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1 GBit/s At Home Was Yesterday! 10 Gbit/s Is The New Black!

While I’ve had a 1 Gbit/s Fiber connection at home in Paris since 2014 with speeds well beyond 250 Mbit/s downlink and 50 Mbit/s uplink, most people in Germany can still only dream of fiber connectivity. So while I consider myself fortunate with fiber in Paris and at least 50 Mbit/s down – 10 Mbit/s up in Cologne the next step has now been taken, 10 Gbit/s symmetric for home users!

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The 5G Core – Part 4 – SMS Forever!

At least in its current incarnation, the 5G core network specification in 3GPP TS 23.501 makes it quite clear that 3GPP aims to cut the cord to older network generations. Handovers, for example, have only been defined between 4G and 5G. No interworking is planned to 2G and 3G networks. But as in Asterix comics where all of Gaul is under control of the Romans except for a small village there is one exception to this rule: SMS!

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