Search Results for: moved me

Microsoft Windows 10 behaves like a spy under your fingertips these days, Apple gives you less and less freedom on its desktop OS, so there's never been a better time to regain privacy and freedom by switching to Linux on the desktop. Over the years I wrote many articles on this blog about my Linux … Continue reading Moving to Linux Full Time – Dan Gillmor Writes About His Experiences

Every now and then it would be great to have a full operating system on a tablet rather than Android or another mobile optimized and castrated replacement that is just too inflexible for my taste. From some reports I've seen over time I was aware that Ubuntu has some sort of touch screen and on-screen keyboard integration but little is written about it. Recently, I came across the Lenovo Yoga 3 – 11" that has a 360 degrees rotatable keyboard and a touch screen. It can be used as a Laptop, as a screen only with the keyboard as a stand and in a full "tablet" like mode with the screen rotated 360 degrees so it rests on the backside of the keyboard. That sounded interesting and it's price tag of €599 fit my idea of what I would pay for such a device. But would it run Linux in a way that the device is usable in a non-keyboard mode? I tried hard to find more information on the net but came up pretty much empty handed. So I decided to give it a try myself as some of the stuff that I found at least indicated that it could work. After about a week I'm ready to give you an account of how it went from me, so here we go. It's going to be one of those long blog entries so if you only care for the summary, jump right to the end the post. Otherwise just read on for the nitty-gritty details of my adventure.

When I recently had problems keeping a UDP session alive over a NAT router I found out that my Raspberry Pi acting as the NAT router only keeps port mapping for the UDP session for 3 minutes. If there is no traffic during that time the mapping is discarded and all incoming packets afterward will … Continue reading UDP NAT Timeouts and How To Change Them On Linux

I'm getting quite a number of questions lately on what Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are all about. Whenever I try to give an elevator pitch style answer, however, I can often see that lots of question marks remain. I guess the problem is that people who haven't seen virtualization in practice so far have difficulties imagining the concept. So I've decided to explain NFV and SDN from a different angle, starting with virtualization on the desktop or notebook PC, i.e. at home, which is what most people can try out themselves, imagine or at least relate to. Once the concept of virtualization at home becomes clear, the next step is to have a look why and how virtualization is used in data centers in the cloud today. From here it's only a tiny step to NFV. And finally, I'll explain how SDN fits into the picture. This is probably one of the longest posts I ever had, so bring some time. As part of the exercise, I'll cover things like Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), OpenStack, OpenFlow, the OpenNetwork Foundation, etc. (Note: Should you have noticed that the order of the terms in the last sentence does not make sense at all, you probably know already everything that I'm going to talk about in this post).

In my post from a couple of day ago on how to home-cloud-enable everyone, one of the important building blocks is an SSH tunnel from a server with a public IP address to the Owncloud server at home, i.e. not accessible directly from the Internet. I didn’t go into the details of how this works, … Continue reading Using SSH to Tunnel Packets Back To The Homecloud

Believe it or not but I am still using an 802.11g access point at home because the 802.11n access point that is part of my high end VDSL router at home is just crap. In most cases the 20 Mbit/s I can get out of it through two walls is good enough for my purposes. … Continue reading Some Wi-Fi 802.11n and 802.11ac speeds in practice

About twice a year there are rumors in the German mobile industry that O2 and E-Plus are about to merge one way or other. This time, it's more than a rumor as O2 has actually made an official offer of around 5 billion Euros in cash + 17% of O2 stock for Dutch telecom incumbent … Continue reading O2 Germany and E-Plus To Merge (Yet Again)? Some Thoughts on Benefits and Tech Background

Antennas and base station sites, they can be seen everywhere these days but it's pretty difficult to see how they change over time. When I recently came home and looked out the window I could at first not  exactly say what it was but I had the impression that something had changed at the antenna … Continue reading How Antennas Change Over Time