Hosted at the University of Mauritius (UoM), Logan made a presentation explaining the “bufferbloat” problem in our network equipment [1].

Buffer is a memory where data is stored temporarily before being transferred to another place [2]. For example, the conveyor belt at the supermarket can be thought as a buffer. Imagine a person buying stuffs for his family for one month and you are waiting for him to finish checking out for you to buy your single pack of chewing gums.

You just wasted an enormous amount of time. You’d feel pretty much pissed about it.

Reducing the amount of articles a person can put on a conveyor belt to let’s say 10 articles max will prevent you from waiting excessive amount of time as compared to being behind a person with 100+ articles.

This is what CoDel wants to achieve from what I understood from the presentation. Reducing the queue length of network equipment to allow more dropping of “elephant flows” to allow reduce serving time of “mice” and “ants”.

I’m not sure what CoDel does more than just reducing queue length. And yeah, CoDel drops packets from the front of the queue rather than the end of it.

Does it make sense? I think yes. Let’s say you are on Mauritius Telecom’s MyT LaFibre when your 50GB allowance is over. Internet becomes a pain. Facebook is taking more than 2 minutes to load. You press the reload button 5 times. When the packet of your first request is reaching Facebook server you already refreshed your page making the request stale. The server still processes the first request and sends back. Meanwhile you are waiting packets from the 5th request. If the server just drops packets from the front, the latest flows will be served. Still doesn’t make sense?

Anyways, from a hacker’s point of view, doesn’t it become easier to do Denial of Service (DoS) attacks? Let’s say Mr X just send a packet to a server. I just flood the server queue so as his request gets dropped. Sending burst data to servers can result in some sort of “VIP” service since all requests before the queue is dropped. Maybe Logan can enlighten me in the next presentation.

CoDel however is currently being designed and tweaked for latencies not more than 100ms Logan says. Will it work in the Mauritian context where latencies are around 300-350ms? Students from universities are invited to study the mechanism and improve user experience for Mauritius and African countries.

[1] http://logan.hackers.mu/2015/08/linux-meeting-29082015
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_buffer

After being greatly impressed by the Alcatel POP D3, I thought why not get another Alcatel greater speced Alcatel phone; I bought myself an Alcatel POP 2 (4.5) Dual Sim edition.

CPU: Quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53
RAM: 1 GB
Coupled with a Quad-core ARM CPU and a 1GB RAM, the performance is awesome. Multi-tasking is very feasible. Navigating between opened apps is fast. I have no complaint at all performance-wise. Surpasses my needs actually. I don’t use the phone as a desktop due to the small screen and no keyboard 😛

Camera: 5MP Back, VGA Front
The rear camera is quite decent. As compared to the previous Alcatel POP D3, the current phone camera has auto-focus included. The rear camera also can record decent 1080p videos.

Front camera is full crap though. Maybe I’m just too ugly for it 😀

4G LTE with Dual Sim
Haven’t tested LTE yet as it is not yet deployed fully in Mauritius and I think my current SIM card is not supported too.

To be noted here is that only 1 Sim slot is 4G,3.5G and 3G. The other one is only EDGE capable, i.e. speed is about max 384kbps theoretically. You can’t really browse the web on EDGE.

The other thing to note is that the SIM card is a Micro SIM one. Had to cut my current sim to be able to fit in the port. Operation successful with help of dad :3

OS: Android 4.4.4
Damn the phone software is buggy.

1. When the phone is on silent or vibrate only mode, when a call is received, the phone automatically goes on loud mode and rings! Bad bad.Can’t bring your phone at meetings or at work because of this.

2. In the camera view, swiping left brings you to the gallery. You’d expect to see your latest photos taken but you see the oldest photos in your memory card. Not even limited to the DCIM/Camera folder.

3. Changing volume during a video or game is a huge huge irritation. The volume meter takes the whole screen and it present like for 5-7 seconds. Who the hell thought of this?

4. When ear phone plugged in, sometimes when a call arrives, can’t use the phone inbuilt microphone and listen in the earphones provided the earphone doesn’t feature a mic. But sometimes it works.

5. Google keep widget doesn’t seem to be working despite the app updated itself numerous times.

Verdict
Great hardware for the price. But software is buggy as hell. I wouldn’t recommend buying it unless Alcatel releases a firmware update with the latest Android. Don’t buy with the current firmware. Don’t.

This website was hosted on a 128mB RAM VPS. Lot’s of time with a little traffic, the server would go down.

Finally upgraded to a 512mB RAM with Dual Core CPU. Hope my uptime will be a lot better and hope to be posting more blog articles.

🙂