When I moved in a year ago, there wasn’t a broadband connection in this house, but there was a phone line — with BT apparently. So I went for the option, which I hoped would be the quickest (in terms of getting connected): BT. 8meg sounded ok to me, and I didn’t want to use 3G all the time (although I had a lot of traffic allowance on my contract).

We were in fact online after a couple of days. However, we did not get 8meg. We were around 6meg first, with a rather ridiculous upstream speed:

But, as we all know BT, things never get better. They only get worse… This year we had “impressive” results, especially in the evenings:

This picture might look like an exception, but it’s not. Towards the end of the contract things got even worse:

I’d like to point out again, that this connection was supposed to be a 8meg connection!

Even my T-Mobile 3G connection could compete with that:

We were told that our line quality is too poor to offer higher speeds. And the exchange was too far away, they said. In fact it’s only about 300m down the street! Plus, one might wonder why we got 6meg downstream half a year earlier then? Why did it constantly get worse, especially in the evenings? Right, because the uplinks from the exchange onwards are blocked. They connect more customers than they actually can handle. Should introduce Congestion Charge there, seriously! So, probably it doesn’t surprise anyone that we did not stay with BT.

Virgin Media’s fibre optic offers were very appealing. Our neighbours next door have it. Our neighbours on the other side next door can have it. And even in the same house, our neighbours upstairs can have it. That’s what the online availability checker said and still says. Guess what? Right, we cannot have it!

I thought a support call might actually help discover an error in their database, and in fact we can have it, too. Well, I thought. Obviously every man-hour is way more expensive than the monthly fibre optic rental customers are being charged. So they showed little to no effort, and told me that I can’t have it, because that would be technically impossible. Why? The cable is out there, and my neighbours upstairs can have it. Why would it be technically impossible? The sophisticated answer was: I don’t know. The system shows it’s impossible and wont change in due course.

A second call, hoping to talk to someone who’s a little bit brighter, didn’t make a difference. Other words, same meaning.

People recommended Be* and reckoned that they had a good customer support, too. Interestingly they estimated a possible line speed of 19meg!  Wow! To be fair, I would have been happy with anything beyond 4meg, which wouldn’t drop in the evenings.

Only one week after we decided to switch, we were connected with Be*. There was only a 3 or 4 hours gap on the day they switched the line. While I was working from home, I could fill that gap with T-Mobile 3G.

One of the first things I did after we got connected was, of course, to verify the line speed with Be*. Here’s the first result:

Yay! But…wait. Didn’t they say 19meg downstream and 2.5meg upstream? So we only got half of the promised speed. Hmm. Of course, still way better than BT ever was — on the same physical phone line! However, we are humans… we always want more, especially when someone promises to give more. So I quickly changed my mind and decided not to be happy to have 4meg or more. That’s probably because I somehow expected that the line wasn’t capable of offering more than the 6meg we initially got from BT. But as it was, I became greedy

After a couple of support tickets and two weeks later, the best results we ever got (relatively stable) were these:

Be*’s support turned out to be good with simple things, and total failure with difficult things. Arguable if support is the right term then. Actually their user forums were more helpful than their paid staff. Ping here, traceroute there, connect via Ethernet rather than wireless… Also they didn’t really read the whole trail of the ticket. Just the last message. Which, obviously, resulted in the same questions being asked over and over again — and a solution being severely delayed.

The funny thing was that the BeBox (the provided DSL router) synced with different speeds on every single re-connect. Plus, it started to reboot randomly, dropping the DSL connection for 5 minutes each. Sometimes 4-5 times a day (probably more often, but we didn’t notice). How would a ping or traceroute help to solve this? (Yes, I have been asked a couple of times to provide pings and traceroutes to google.com and the BBC!)

Anyway, let’s continue…

Be* offers three different DSL profiles (sync setups), which customers can choose from:

• optimised for speed
• normal
• optimised for reliability

Plus, you can opt in for the fast path option, which gives way faster round trip times at the cost of reduced error correction.

The BeBox was using the “normal” profile without fast path. We did try the “optimised for speed” option, but that made things worse. The disconnects really bothered me, but I didn’t want to reduce the speed further. So the picture above shows the maximum we could get through the line using a BeBox, and accepting a couple of disconnections a day. I wasn’t impressed.

In different forums I found people complaining about the BeBox, describing similar symptoms. So I thought: Let’s just try another router, for whatever it’s worth.

I ordered the D-Link DSL-2640B (£50). When it arrived, it took me about 30 minutes to get it running (20 minutes to get the DHCP lease renewed, 10 minutes configuration and reboot).  And here are the very first results (still with Be*’s “normal” profile, and without fast path):

Did you notice? More than 3meg more downstream with exactly the same line and cabling, just a replaced router. And this was an average speed test result. (By the way: I did not only use speedtest.net with their Maidenhead server; I double-checked the results with other tests, too — all of the reported results in this article)

But it gets even more interesting: As the D-Link apparently can deal way better with a below-average line quality, I wondered if I could push it a bit. Today I asked Be* to switch to “optimised for speed” and activate fast path on my line. And now watch this:

To digest this article… On the same physical line, I got:

• 6meg initally with BT
• dropping down to 2meg with BT
• 11meg with Be* and their BeBox
• 16.5meg with Be*, optimised settings and a D-Link router

Using Be* with a third-party router can result in 10.5meg more bandwidth than BT said would be possible on that phone line, and even 5.5meg (50%!) more than Be*’s BeBox can achieve on that line.

The D-Link router didn’t show any uncorrectable errors so far. No disconnects. No other unexpected problems. But very good performance!

Why the heck do the ISPs bundle crap hardware with their offers, causing unnecessary support inquiries? And why do the ISPs not have support staff in place, who are actually capable of dealing with the increased support load then?

Or in other words: Why does the customer have to spend lots of time and a bit of extra money to figure out and solve the issues on their own, while all they requested was to get what they actually pay for?

[ Update: I just realised that Be* switched the line back to the normal profile without fast path active. Sync speed and throughput went immediately back down to the old values. Let's see how long it takes to get my preferred settings activated (and hopefully persisted!) again. I'm getting slightly mad at them. And the option on their "website" (quotation marks on purpose -- see youself!), where I could in theory choose the setting myself, is broken, too. So I have to wait for their support to do it... ]

[ Update 2: About one hour later, I'm back to the desired settings... Let's see for how long. They claim it has been changed on the member portal. I wish I could do that, but firstly it's broken there, and secondly I haven't touched it at all... Funny people. ]

First of all, questions like this, which do not tell anything about the author’s aims and intentions, are not answerable. One could as well ask: Ferrari or Landrover? I’d suggest taking the Ferrari for the next cross-country rally, whereas the Landrover is definitely the best choice for the F1 track. Anyway, you got my point.

This blog post has potential for flamewars between the lovers of BSD and Linux, and also between lovers of either of the Linux distributions. So let me emphasize that this is my personal opinion.

Let me kick off with two certainly arguable statements and take it from there:

• Production environment: The operating system of your choice should be the one, which you are most comfortable administering, because it’s your job to secure it to the best of your knowledge and solve upcoming issues within the least possible amount of time and effort.
• Experimental environment: Do whatever you want to. Experimental environments are meant to gain more knowledge, experience or compare it with other environments.

In this context, let’s be clear about this: Any server that is accessible from any other untrusted machine (aka Internet), is a production environment! Why so? Because it could easily be turned into a threat to others (if not secured properly), which can cause trouble with your ISP or with third parties, which leads to costs, and in the worst case lawsuits! This means: Although you run it for your own pleasure, you have to ensure that your pleasure does not become a nuisance to others — be it by your mistake or by third parties taking over your server. Should be common sense, but apparently it’s not.

Now that we’ve understood that the playground approach is misplaced in a server environment, you may want agree with my previous statements.

“I hear you, but which Linux/BSD/Unix is the best for which aims?” Let me first briefly explain how things have evolved and why a FreeBSD user will have problems recommending any Linux distribution.

Unlike any Linux distribution, which strictly speaking is merely the kernel bundled with a bunch of (mostly) GNU tools and programs, FreeBSD is a real operating system, where all core elements are maintained by a central “authority”, the FreeBSD Project (which is funded by donations collected by the FreeBSD Foundation). That ensures a high level of integrity and as a result stability. FreeBSD (like NetBSD) is a fork of the original BSD by the Berkeley University, which was derived from AT&T Unix. Nowadays you find three major BSDs out there: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD (which was forked from NetBSD). They are maintained by their core teams, and cross-port various functionality whenever suitable (e.g. OpenBSD’s packet filter pf). When you install any of these BSD’s base, you will end up with a working operating system and all core tools needed to administer it.

When you install any of the approximately 250 different Linux distributions out there, you more precisely install a third-party bootloader, the Linux kernel, and a whole bunch of third-party (GNU) tools and software. What exactly you end up with, depends on the taste and policies of the distributors. It should be easy to understand that a distribution which focuses on including the latest drivers and software in every release, cannot be as stable as a distribution with a rather long release cycle that has got a big number of enterprise-level users. Essentially they are all the same, but the collection of software and tools (and their branding and look&feel) differs. As various GNU projects have got a lot of cross-dependencies (e.g. PHP with GD, ImageMagick, MySQL, to mention a popular one), it is a tedious and time-consuming task to bundle the right versions with each other in order to get a stable system.

Or in other words: A Linux distributor has to ensure that their selection of third-party software form a stable system, whereas the major BSD derivates maintain the core system themselves. In the BSD world, third-party software isn’t part of the core functionality. Hence BSD doesn’t depend on the good will of other software projects. However, you can of course get a lot of third-party software, too: The portstree (in FreeBSD for example), currently contains over 20,000 different programs, carefully selected and tested, and linked against other ports and/or the core libraries. As the latter are provided by the BSD maintainers, you can be sure to have a solid foundation.

If you look at SELinux, it was a rather chaotic uncoordinated situation in the beginning: SELinux was developed and maintained by the NSA, and was not part of the kernel initially, but you could compile it as a kernel module (don’t get me started on kernel modules on a server). The tools to actually use it are part of the GNU coreutils package — third party software, strictly speaking. When SELinux reached a stable status and was supported by the Linux kernel, some distributors decided to include and activate it by default (Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS), while others didn’t make use of it at all (Debian, Ubuntu). So security was a matter of the distributor’s taste. That happens when there’s no central “authority” which ensures continuity, and coordinates kernel (and related) development. A sad result was that people didn’t want to get used to SELinux, because it wasn’t (and still isn’t) accepted as a standard and must-have. Even nowadays you read recommendations like “use ’setenforce 0′”, which effectively switches SELinux restrictions and its security improvements off! As far as I know, only RHEL and CentOS install and activate SELinux and its utilities by default. They are also the only mainstream Linux distributions which activate the iptables firewall by default, and apply a restrictive ruleset, by the way.

You’ll still even find Linux distributions, which allegedly target the server market, without SELinux utilities installed. How can you ignore huge security enhancements in a server environment? Ah right, the distributor has got a different taste and would probably add no other security tools.

Apologies for my sarcasm. Linux is not all bad, but you must not expect any distribution to be as rock-solid as any of the three main BSDs. Let’s check out which Linux is the least of all evil

The first commercial distribution back in the early 90’s was Slackware, which nowadays is only being used on a minority of Linux-based servers. Slackware is sort of considered geeky.

A couple of years ago, the big players were RedHat Linux in the English-speaking countries, and SuSE in the German-speaking areas. That has changed. RedHat Linux for the commodity market does not exist any more (it is now the community-maintained Fedora Linux, supported by RedHat). RedHat’s own Linux distribution is RedHat Enterprise Linux, which obviously targets enterprise-level customers, who are willing to pay for licenses and professional support. For those who don’t, CentOS as a de-branded RHEL copy has become more and more popular. It claims 100% binary compatibility with RHEL, without asking for license fees, and without offering professional paid support. The target group for both RHEL and CentOS are enterprises and server installations, whereas Fedora targets the desktop market.

Especially in Germany, Debian Linux is also widely used. The easy package management with apt-get certainly played an important role in its success. Fedora introduced yum to make RPM package management as easy. (Open)SuSE seems to lose market share. YaST as their package manager could be one reason.

Ubuntu was started as a Debian derivate just a few years ago, and initially aimed the desktop market trying to keep up with current hardware drivers and new features. Apart from its LTS (long term support) versions, which are being released once every two years, the life cycle of the half-year releases is very short. However, Ubuntu has experienced great success and played an important role in making Linux a widely accepted desktop operating system. In my opinion it is not the best choice for server installations where robustness is more important than introducing the latest features and device drivers, though. It also lacks SELinux utilities in its default installation.

For the tough cookies, there’s also Gentoo Linux, which covers kind of a niche market: people who believe in stability by compiling everything from scratch (and most obviously took BSD as an example), but who are reluctant to leave the Linux terrain towards BSD. Why am I saying this? Simply because compiling from scratch is rather not suitable for newbies, but all the effort still doesn’t provide a BSD level of stability in a Linux environment as too many bits and pieces are actually third-party software.

Personally, although I used to prefer Debian (before SELinux became de facto standard), I cannot take that distribution seriously any more. They made a terrible mistake when they “patched” the OpenSSL library, turning all generated keys and certificates built with them into garbage (or what do we call keys and certs which are created with a predictable random generator?). In my opinion, it shows pretty well why a more centralised approach of maintaining core components is better. There’s a thin line between diversity and mess. When distributors start patching core components just like that, rather than contributing code to the upstream projects, the diversity will soon equal mess — and introduce absolutely unnecessary distribution-related security flaws.

In my personal opinion, CentOS is the Linux distribution for a server setup (or RHEL for those who rely on professional support), whereas a desktop or laptop user’s best bet would be Ubuntu (if you can live with a short release cycle and are happy to update your whole system often) or Fedora.

However, I do prefer FreeBSD for servers (as you could easily tell after reading all this).  And on a desktop/laptop, MacOS is my favourite. (I know that paying for solid software is political incorrect nowadays, but at least it has a reliable — FreeBSD/Darwin — foundation!)

Ok, everyone has Facebook (at least in English speaking countries people would rather ask if you are on Facebook than what your phone number is). And then there’s Twitter, another way of keeping friends or customers or whoever informed about what’s going on. Plus, you need to share you favourite URLs with digg, del.icio.us, or any other social bookmarking service of your choice. And of course, you need your own blog! And a Flickr account for your photos. Did I cover all of the services a modern Web 2.0 person has to have? Probably not. But now the core question: How do you manage to keep everything up 2 date? I mean as someone who’s already got a full-time job…

Comments, suggestions, URL appreciated!

But as I took a closer view at it recently, it turned out to be a pretty simple task. Only people with loads of domain names and/or restricted nameserver control might run into problems.

In a nutshell, you only need to do this in order to get SPF running on your own server and to tell other mail servers how to deal with your domain name:

• add a policy daemon to your MTA (e.g. postfix-policyd-spf) — pretty easy, really!
• add SPF/TXT records to your zonefiles as described here

That’s it, honestly. Assuming, you have successfully finished the two tasks, your mail server will block all mails that originate from domains, which have SPF records set and been delivered through other than the allowed hosts. And your domains will be protected from being misused on all other mail servers which use SPF as well.

Example:

example.com.       IN MX 10  mail
mail.example.com.  IN TXT "v=spf1 mx -all
mail.example.com.  IN A 1.2.3.4

Now, mails from johndoe@example.com must be delivered through the mailserver mail.example.com. All mailservers which implement SPF will refuse to accept mails from other than that server. Especially the big players like Googlemail do make use of SPF. Although some don’t block mails, they at least add a telling header which makes spam-filtering easier:

Received-SPF: fail (google.com: domain of mail@***.co.uk does not designate
85.***.***.*** as permitted sender) client-ip=85.***.***.***
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=hardfail (google.com: domain of
mail@***.co.uk does not designate 85.***.***.*** as permitted sender)
smtp.mail=mail@***.co.uk

So what are you waiting for? The more people make SPF mandatory on their servers, the better is its protection against SPAM.

This was how I got my first Mac OS based computer. It did not take long to make me love it, because the difference between Mac OS and other operating systems is, that they kept an eye on detail. They built an OS which clearly works and seldomly causes any hassle. Mac OS combines a great UI with an incredibly good usuability and a solid and stable foundation: Darwin/BSD. Since I got my MacBook Pro, it never freezed, it never crashed and it never did anything unexpected. Can Windows do that? And there was no problem getting parts of the hardware to work properly within a minimum amount of time. Can Linux do that?

To cut a long story short: I am not a freak any more who is willing to spend hours on setting up his computer and getting peripherials to work. I expect my laptop to work out of the box. And I really do hate unexpected behaviour. Mac OS has convinced me as a desktop/laptop operating system.

And what about the hardware? Well, it is at least as convincing as the OS! Of course, you can get the same piece of hardware cheaper, if you only look at the technical data:

• Intel Core2Duo 2×2.4 GHz
• 2 GB RAM
• 200 GB SATA HDD Fujitsu connected to Intel ICH8
• Broadcom WLAN, Ethernet (1Gbit), Bluetooth 2.1
• 15.4″ Widescreen TFT (1440×900px)
• DL-DVD/CD burner
• Firewire 400, Firewire 800
• 2x USB 2.0
• Audio in/out
• DVI connector

That’s certainly a rock-solid equipment, but nothing which justifies a price of £1,299. To be honest, technical data is only one part of the story. A good laptop is more than a collection of good components. And this is why a MacBook Pro is better than most other laptops:

• Battery lifetime: using office applications and terminal windows, I can run the MacBook Pro for more than 5 hours without power supply!
• Trackpad: it is precise and huge enough; together with the two finger scrolling and zooming functionality I hardly ever need a mouse
• Magnetic power plug: Did you ever pull the power cable incidentally? Don’t worry, because the magnetic plug is safe
• Air flow: There’s no risk of over-heating the laptop when putting it on a soft surface, because the air flow cannot be covered
• Robust case
• Great keyboard: except from getting used to Apple’s special keys (which only applies to new Apple users), they keyboard is excellent
• Reasonable sound quality: Compared to other laptops, the speakers are quite ok. Of course it cannot compete with a home stereo
• Excellent display (I use the matt one, because I don’t like makeup mirrors)
• last but not least the aforementioned Mac OS X (“Leopard”)

So, yes the MacBook Pro is expensive. But it is clearly worth its price! After having used it for almost three months, I can say: I love it!

In fact, this blog is not about one certain topic only. It will represent “snapshots” of my work and experience as a Systems Administrator, clearly focused on Linux/BSD and Mac OS X (the latter rather from a user’s than a Systems Administrator’s point of view). I should have started this blog years ago. Anyway, it is never too late to contribute to the community. If there are any other bloggers out there, who are interested in linking this blog, please let me know.