Monday I went to the movies. Jaco Van Dormaels latest movie 'Mr Nobody' was playing. A very good must-see movie made by a Belgian Director. It's the best movie I've seen this year, and the best Belgian movie I've ever seen. Other good movies of him are: toto le heros, le huitieme jour. Seems like all the movies he made are very good.

This made me do a list of other directors of who you almost with certainty can know that when they direct a movie it will end up a good movie :-)



So in no particular order, some of my favourites:

- Luc Besson (5th element, taxi, banlieue 13, transporter, kiss of the dragon, la femme nikita, leon, le grand blue)
- Darren Aranofsky (Pi, Requiem for a dream) bad (the fountain) unknown (the wrestler)
- Coen Brothers (blood simple, hudsucker proxy, fargo, big lebowski, the man who wasn't there, no country for old men, burn after reading, a serious man)
- Jason Reitman (Thank you for smoking, Juno, Up in the air)
- Richard Kelly (donnie darko), unfortunately his other movies aren't that good (southland tales, the box)
- Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, Amelie Poulain, La cite des enfants perdus, un long dimanche de fiancialles, micmacs a tire-larigot)
- Jaco Van Dormael (Toto le heros, le huitieme jour, mr nobody)
- Sofia Coppola (the virgin suicides, lost in translation, marie antoinette)
- Woody Allen (too many to write)
- Guy Ritchie (Lock, stock and two smoking barrels, Snatch, Revolver, RocknRolla)
- Tarsem Singh (The cell, the fall)
- Timur Bekmambetov (Night watch, day watch, wanted)
- Quentin Tarantino (too many to write)
- Tim Burton (Vincent, Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare before christmas, corpse bride, sleepy hollow, mars attacks, sweeney todd)
- David Fincher (Se7en, The game, Fight Club)
- Bryan Singer (Usual suspects, X2)
- Michel Gondry (eternal sunshine of the spotless mind)
- Chan-wook Park (oldboy, sympathy for lady vengeance, sympathy for mr vengeance)
- Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mama tambien, children of men)

Directors to watch (first-timers)
- Duncan Jones (Moon)
- Jamin Winans (Ink)
- Neill Blomkamp (District 9)

Finally a reason to buy an xbox 360, this quirky hack-n-slash, button masher, japanese game which has been released for PS3 and XBOX360. But the game it is suffering from high loading times and low fps (20 and lower) on the PS3 version.

According to the internets this is because it has been developed on a PC and so easier to optimize for the xbox 360. A crack-team of PS3 developers has been deployed by sony has to work on optimizing it for the PS3 but in the end, it seems like they failed to get a decent performance.

So I bought myself the cheapest xbox available, the xbox arcade, and a copy of bayonetta. Worth every penny/eurocent! Looks like 2010 will be a good year for the action, hack-n-slash loving crowd, with bayonneta, dark sider, dante's inferno and god of war 3 coming out in a few months!

A new year, new challenges.

Stuff I'm planning to do this year:
- migrating our existing servers to RHEL
- implementing a distributed VCS for our systems
- cisco nexus 1000V
- conntrackd active/passive and/or active/active firewalls on linux with connection tracking
- high availability DHCP servers
- comparing different commercial firewall appliance vendors with our homegrown linux firewall to see if we should move
- deploying cisco 5508 wlan controllers, and converting our autonomous AP's to lightweight ones
- sslvpn SSO / windows / kerberos integration
- dot1x tests
- following dot1x will be voip installations
- and some more that aren't on the top of my head right now

Lately I've been busy doing some tests to see if we could use linux as a 10gbit firewall and/or router.

Specs:
- Nehalem architecture - dual E5520 (2.27ghz quadcore) => 16 CPU's (NUMA)
- Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82599EB 10-Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01) in a 8x PCI Express slot (ixgbe 2.0.44-k2 driver) - with 16 TX/RX queues
- 72Gb ram (800mhz)

The picture below shows the performance of a vanilla 2.6.32 kernel on above RHEL 5.3 system. No optimizations have been done in proc yet.

The x-axis shows the packet size (udp packets generated by packetgen on another identical machine)
The y-axis shows Mbps and Kpps, depending on what line you choose to view :-)

In this particular graph, we had 50 FORWARD rules configured in netfilter and ipv4 forwarding enabled, the packetgenerator has been finetuned to the maximum number of packets before packets where dropped on the router/firewall.

The Opt Kpps shows the theoretical 10gbit wire-speed pps, which we meet at a packetsize of about 640 bytes.



The preliminary conlusions are that 10gbit firewalling is possible as long as you don't use too much netfilter rules and your average packets aren't too small :-)
(ofcourse more testing is needed oa tcp, proc optimizations and more netfilter rules)