[nycbug-talk] Africa Network Traffic

[Miles Nordin]

google has this spinning globe map in their lobby like xearth but more
3D, with oozing use-bars coming off the surface like smoke rising from
factories but much more ominous-looking because it's blue and glowing
and weirdly-textured.  I said, ``I think there must be something wrong
with your geoip dataset because South America is completely dark.''
The tour guide said, ``umh, yeah.  That's probably it.''

Also it's two questions, ``how much content originates in ___,'' and
``how much traffic is sourced from ___.'': many people looking at the
same thing, vs a few people looking at different things.

in more on-topic but still kind of frivolous news, I just netbooted
OpenBSD over an intel em/wm fiber card.  The card didn't come with a
PXE ROM, so I made an .iso EtherBoot image with
http://rom-o-matic.net/, and stuck this .iso in a CD drive.  It boots
and loads OpenBSD's pxeboot(8) stage2 over the fiber.  EtherBoot has
this PXE_EXPORT option now which offers a PXE stack to the image it
downloads with tftp: this means you can now use the mostly-Linuxy
EtherBoot to boot BSD in a sane way.  You could sometimes sort of boot
BSD with it before this feature existed, but now you can do BSD
without compiling so-called ``ELF support'' into Etherboot, and
without giving up the BSD stage2 'boot> ' prompt and passing root
device information to the kernel, and stuff.  EtherBoot provides the
network driver, and OpenBSD's normal pxeboot provides the 'boot> '
prompt and the kernel ELF relocation.  I'm using EtherBoot 5.4.3 for
this, not gPXE, not grub.  Etherboot 5.2.x won't do this PXE_EXPORT
thing.

Unbelieveably, this combination ``just worked'' on the first try.

Also, this Intel card is the only fiber card that's worked for me in
OpenBSD.  I want fiber because I'm putting a sacrificial old abandoned
PeeCee in a tent on the roof as a wireless AP, and I don't want to
worry about lightning frying anything that isn't sacrifical.  I also
tried a Broadcom 5703 and a couple Alteon AceNIC's (ti(4)).  The
former doesn't work, and the latter work in FreeBSD, but not OpenBSD.

I don't particularly like using these Intel cards because I heard on
some mailing list there is some alignment problem with the design that
makes them slow on non-i386 (?), and because I just don't like Intel,
but I guess they seem to be the best-supported at least on i386, with
both EtherBoot and OpenBSD supporting the fiber version of the card
that I ended up with.  ebay for something like 'intel pro/1000 mf' if
you want one.
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