Date: August 30th 2010

METTLE NEWS
[News letter on Mettle(tm) brand of products; Industry updates, Tips and Case
studies]

August 2010

Volume 3, Issue 6





In this issue:



* Editorial

* IT Industry news: Google's Speedy

* Tip of the month: Backup & Restore Mettle SE Running Configuration

* Mettle SE feature: Event logging on Remote Sys log Server





* Editorial *



Greetings,

Most of the IT managers are keen on updating Internet link bandwidth to speed up browsing experience. But the situation is more complex now. Even if there is more than enough bandwidth, the page load often exceeds acceptable limit. The "Industry News" section talks about a presentation by Google in the Velocity conference on this subject.

Mettle SE is designed to make you feel confident about your IT infrastructure besides performing its basic functions. This month's "Tip of the Month" describes how you can retain your most trusted configuration even if you play around with it or if you replace/upgrade your Mettle SE.

Logs provides live information about what happens in the system. Mettle SE has a provision to connect a log server to it so that you can process the logs using third-party tools of your choice. This month's "Feature of the Month" explains this facility.

With you a month ahead filled with technology and excitement.



Editor, Mettle News
(mettlenews@mettle.in)




* IT Industry News: Speedy - Google's SPDY Protocol



During the Velocity conference in Santa Clara, CA, Google's VP of Engineering Urs Holzle has warned that any improvement to the network bandwidth will be wasted unless the underlying protocols are updated. He said that even though the average network bandwidth will grow by a factor of three from 1.8Mbps to 5.4Mbps users will not be able to exploit the increase in bandwidth unless the underlying protocol is fixed.



Internal tests conducted by Google has obtained the result that average website size is 320KB. So with average user bandwidth at 1.84Mbps, website load times should be around 1.4secs. But Google's tests have shown that real load times were close to 5secs. Holzle reckons this variation in theoretical to actual speeds is not due to the network bandwidth but due to the protocol and the browser.



Holzle said in the conference that Google's goal is to achieve 100millisecond load times on the Google Chrome web browser and this will only be possible with the improvements to the Internet's underlying protocols. Chrome was one of the fastest web browsers when it arrived in 2008, the increased speed, in part, was contributed by the revamped JavaScript engine.



Google boosted its image search engine speed by 18 percent by making some modest changes to the TCP protocol, but without making any changes to the site itself. Google believes that on an average 12 percent speed boost can be had with TCP tweaks. Holzle said the modest change which involved increasing TCP's initial congestion window involved changing about 10 lines of code.



Pushing the speed envelope, Google is developing a new application protocol it calls SPDY (pronounced Speedy) meant to reduce web latency via multiplexed streams, request prioritisation and HTTP header compression. According to Holzle the new protocol can reduce packet count by 40pc and byte count by 15pc and an improvement in downloading speed of upto 55pc over simulated home connections. SPDY creates a session layer between HTTP application layer and TCP transport layer, it is not a HTTP replacement protocol but augments it. SPDY overrides parts of HTTP protocol such as connection management and data transfer formats. Holzle said that on low bandwidth links with SPDY's header compression alone has seen a latency reduction of 85pc.



http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/11/spdy-google-wants-to-speed-up-the-web-by-ditching-http.ars





* Tip of the month: Backup & Restore Mettle SE Running Configuration *



Backing up:



It is wise to backup the running configuration of Mettle SE after you have made changes to the system settings. Keeping backup of running configuration ready allows you to relax and be on the safe side if things go wrong. To take backup of your running configuration:



- Go to Diagnostics --> Backup/Restore.

- It is recommended to keep the backup area as 'All'

- Click on 'Download configuration' button.

- The configuration file would be downloaded into your system and named in this format - config-<host name>-<timestamp>.xml

- Keep the configuration backup file safe.



Restoring from backup:



You can restore Mettle SE to a running configuration as saved in the backup file from the same screen you did the backing up from. To restore to a saved configuration:



- Select a restore area, usually 'All'

- Click 'Browse' and select the backup configuration file from your computer.

- Click on 'Restore configuration' button.



Mettle SE would reboot once you have clicked on the 'Restore configuration' button and restored settings would be applied.



http://kb.mettle.in/entry/53/





* Mettle SE Feature: Event logging on Remote Sys log Server



Factory setting of Mettle SE is set to store the log entries locally in the hard drive. But it is possible for you to enable remote logging in Mettle SE which will store the long entries remotely in a sys log server. Log entries in Mettle SE can only be of a specific size and as new log is generated old logs are deleted. If you have a sys log server, enabling remote logging is a good practice as it will aid with troubleshooting and long term monitoring and there is no limit to the log size except for your hard drive capacity.



- To enable remote sys log logging go to:

- Status --> System Logs

- Go to the 'Settings' tab and tick on 'Enable sys log'ing to remote sys log server'

- To disable local logging you may tick on 'Disable writing log files to the local ram disk'. But this is neither required nor recommended.

- Enter the IP address of the remote sys log server in the text field.

- Next you have to select what all events are to be logged in the sys log server. Tick each category you want to have logged.

- Click on 'Save' once the settings are confirmed.



http://kb.mettle.in/entry/54/







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