Authority-by-being-employed-by-Google, rather than by-reproducable-data

Many things rub me up the wrong way. This is one of them.

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1734346&cid=33051506

In summary - the post asserts some interesting facts (which I believe, having done high volume HTTP stuff myself) but when asked about benchmarks to back up his assertions, he replies:

"Unfortunately, nothing I can publish without permission. I can say that I'm in charge of maintaining the software that terminates all HTTP traffic for Google. Draw your own conclusions."

I really do dislike "I work in this area in Google" as a measure of authority. My conclusion is that the developer in question, as clever as he should be, should likely read some history books on "authority by being high up in the priesthood" and where that takes people.

Grr.

More IPv6 hackery..

I've been spending a little time fleshing out some more of the IPv6 preparation work in Lusca. Since they're rather intrusive patches, I'm doing the work in a separate branch (/playpen/LUSCA_HEAD_ipv6) and will merge back bits and pieces as needed.

I've migrated the client db, external URL rewriters, access logging and the client-facing connection management code over to be IPv6 aware. I still have the request_t state, ACL lookups (which is luckily done - but sitting in a branch!), further DNS work and the protocol-facing stuff (HTTP, FTP.)

There isn't much more work involved in getting LUSCA_HEAD ready enough to serve IPv6-facing clients. That'll let me push out Cacheboy content over IPv6.

But for now, it's back to hacking on commercial, customer code.

FreeBSD/MIPS on AR71xx / Routerstation Pro: NIC alignment/size bug fixed!

I found and squished a small bug in the gigabit NIC driver in FreeBSD/MIPS for the AR71xx chipset. It wasn't all that complicated - TX buffers weren't being thoroughly enough checked for alignment/size constraints before being handed to the DMA engine.

It did however fix a few niggling issues. My tunneling stuff was fixed. IPv6 frames are now correctly handled. And ng_nat doesn't cause a panic in the NIC driver. So there's at least three people who are happy. :)