Rui Paulo’s blog

I’ve been hacking the NetBSD lii(4) driver so that it works under FreeBSD. This driver is most notably found on the Asus line of sub-notebooks, Eee PC. So far, so good. I did not finish the porting yet, but the mechanical changes are mostly done.
The reason for this is that I bought an Eee PC 701, hence I need this driver, :-), although I haven’t touched my Eee PC yet (it’s at my parents house). But I will do the first testing this weekend.

If you have this hardware and would like to help with the effort, please email me.

The effort is being revision controlled at //depot/user/rpaulo/lii/.

So, I found some time to continue my SoC work. tcpad is now capable of handling the most important TCP FSM transitions, like CLOSE_WAIT, FIN_WAIT_1, SYN_SENT, etc. I also implemented a basic timer facility that cleans up old connections in TIME_WAIT state. This still doesn’t honor the 2MSL required by the RFC, but it’s a start.
I also cleaned the code a little and improved the debugging macro.

Next is SEQ/ACK analysis.

So, I’ve been busy studying for this month’s exams. Hence, not much tcpad development time was spent.

Nonetheless, I’ve did the initial pcap processing, that is, saving selected packets to a pcap dump file. And that works.

The next step is finish the TCP/IP processing. This includes FSM transitions and SEQ/ACK analysis.

I’ve been running Mac OS X on my MacBook for some time mostly because I needed a very stable platform and good power management for college. But now that college is over, I decided to install FreeBSD again.

After a few hours of compiling/installing/configuring, I booted up Xorg. Of course, I never created a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file because new Xorg versions can auto-detect the hardware. After a few seconds of fluxbox usage, Xorg crashes. WTH? I tried to start it up again. The graphics card registers are in an unexpected state (that’s what the Xorg intel driver tells me). Double WTH?

Only a reboot fixed it.

The problem was that Xorg was using a 24 or 32 bit depth. It works fine with 16 bit.

Unfortunately, this is the “state-of-the-art” when it comes to Xorg and I’m so tired of it that I got back to Mac OS X. I’ve been enduring XFree/Xorg/<insert crappy application here> pain for some years now and I’m only 22 years old. I can try to fix FreeBSD, but I don’t have time to fix all the other applications.

As you may have guessed from the title, this means that I won’t devote my time to the FreeBSD on the MacBook project and, instead, I will dedicate myself to other FreeBSD projects.

For those out there that might be interested, I have been working on/following these FreeBSD networking projects:

• TCP ECN
• TCP ABC
• TCP Congestion Control API
• TCP ABI cleanup

You can find more information about them at the FreeBSD wiki: http://wiki.freebsd.org/TCPProjects8.

It would be great if all of these could be included in FreeBSD 8.0!

I’ve been busy with college assignments, but I’ve been doing some SoC work on my spare time. tcpad is my SoC project for this year and it’s basically a pcap-based TCP session anomaly detector. The basic principle is that, whenever something “strange” happens with a TCP connection, we will dump a pcap file containing the most important packets (TCP FSM transitions and the last 100 packets that arrived prior to the problem).
The current version of tcpad can track only the 3WHS, yet, but more code is to be written as college assignments are all done now.

Hello there,
This my first entry. I decided to finally start blogging about FreeBSD.
I’m also participating in this years SoC with the TCP anomaly detector project, so, this blog will mainly talk about that.

Good luck to everyone on this years SoC!