networking

Monitor network health with somebar

I knew about a MacOS task bar plugin called Anybar, which basically draws an icon on the task bar to which you can send behaviors with a simple nc command. Naturally, someone cloned it for our beloved Free Unices environments, and it’s called somebar. I am sometimes in places with weak network, and I like to see at a glance how is my connection doing, somebar seemed the perfect tool for the task.

FreeBSD networking issues: TCP offloading and checksum

In the past month, it’s the second time I’m being bitten by FreeBSD in the networking field. First time with my own gateway, I had this weird behaviour where machines on a different VLAN than the main one would use the Internet at full speed but would struggle to make any transfer from the main VLAN. Turns out this was a tcp segmentation offload issue, which seems to cause so much problems it is disabled by default in some appliances.