Since April 2004, I am working at the IBM Zurich Research Lab in the
Computer Science department,
Systems Management group on the
AURORA project.
AURORA is a very high performance network monitoring tool which we built based on our research to help us
do even more research in the fields of network monitoring, performance analysis and related areas.
Our main targets are to make it even faster and better scalable than it already is and divising various methods
to get the most information and details out of the network and into the hands of the people who need to look at it.
A lot of interresting problems arise while doing this and that keeps it challenging, especially when somebody with
a 'small' network comes around and wants us to monitor it to see if we can find out where problems occur and what
might be changed to solve all kind of issues with that network.
More information on AURORA:
Next to AURORA I also get my share of the rather large IPv6 projects which tend to give interresting challenges and allow
us to actively use AURORA to determine IPv6 readyness, where it is deployed, where it could be deployed etc.
Next to my little home network setup
Thanks to the lab, I am a very proud owner of an
IBM ThinkPad x60: spaghetti.zurich.ibm.com.
Not the standard edition of course, but the fully loaded one (2GiB memory etc), with that nice extended battery
which can last for about 6/7 hours depending on the load and that is with Wireless active, otherwise it is up to 11 hours.
Still it weighs in at only 1.43kg, which is why I tend to have it in my bag for that 'just in case' situation.
It has an 80GiB disk, of which 70GiB is used for Windows XP Pro and 10GiB for Ubuntu.
The Bluetooth is used to hook up my Bluetooth headset allowing crisp clear VoIP communications, of course without wires.
Oh, did I mention that it is black? :)
Next to spaghetti I also use a deskbelow host (firenze) which is my main development box running Linux and attached to a
nice big 22" screen, though I also tend to use one of the various heavier boxes (read: x3650's) we have in the lab.
On Windows I have a VMWare Server,
which allows me to run the Ubuntu while in Windows, with the help of
Cygwin I have on the Windows side an X-server
and of course bash.
What I do then is SSH into the Ubuntu, which is effectively running on the same machine.
This allows me to run every application that I have under Linux simply on my Windows Desktop.
If I need the full power of Linux I can always use the VM in full screen or alternatively
I can reboot into native Linux to unleash the full power of a native kernel. This is for
instance very handy when needing the full potential of the x60 or when I need to make
use of the special Wireless tools that Linux does provide.
Additionally to that I also have a Virtual PC 2007
in which I have a VM with Windows Vista Ultimate so I can play around with that when I want.
The Ubuntu hostname is Carbonara and the Vista is called Bolognese.
Some of the tools that I use on a day by day basis:
Remote, using either PuTTY or Cygwin's SSH:
- Irssi + BitlBee - IRC/MSN/Yahoo/ICQ client (see network)
- GCC - with all warnings on: -W -Wall -Wshadow -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -Wwrite-strings -Waggregate-return -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wredundant-decls -Wnested-externs -Winline -Wbad-function-cast -fshort-enums -fstrict-aliasing -fno-common -Wno-packed -Wpadded -pedantic -Wformat-security -Wformat -Wmissing-format-attribute -D_REENTRANT -D_THREAD_SAFE -pipe -combine
- Vim - my editor of choice
- Valgrind - can't live without it for development
Thanks to all the authors of these tools for having made them, thereby making my daily activities a lot more pleasant!