In sev­eral pre­vi­ous posts I wrote about my quest for the right source for­mat to stream video to my Sony BRAVIA TV (build in 2009). The last week-end I finally found some­thing which sat­is­fies me.

What I found was serviio, a free UPnP-AV (DLNA) server. It is writ­ten in java and runs on Win­dows, Linux and FreeBSD (it is not listed on the web­site, but we have an not-so-up-to-date ver­sion in the ports tree). If nec­es­sary it transcodes the input to an appro­pri­ate for­mat for the DLNA ren­derer (in my case the TV).

I tested it with my slow Net­book, so that I was able to see with which input for­mat it will just remux the input con­tainer to a MPEG trans­port stream, and which input for­mat would be really re-encoded to a for­mat the TV understands.

The bot­tom line of the tests is, that I just need to use a sup­ported con­tainer (like MKV or MP4 or AVI) with H.264-encoded video (e.g. encoded by x264) and AC3 audio.

The TV is able to chose between sev­eral audio streams, but I have not tested if serviio is able to serve files with mul­ti­ple audio streams (my wife has a dif­fer­ent mother lan­guage than me, so it is inter­est­ing for us to have mul­ti­ple audio streams for a movie), and I do not know if DLNA sup­ports some­thing like this.

Now I just have to replace minidlna (which only works good with my TV for MP3s and Pic­tures) with serviio on my FreeBSD file server and we can for­get about the disk-juggling.

I have a lit­tle prob­lem find­ing a clean solu­tion to the fol­low­ing problem.

A machine with two net­work inter­faces and no default route. The first inter­face gets an IP at boot time and the cor­re­spond­ing sta­tic route is inserted dur­ing boot into the rout­ing table with­out prob­lems. The sec­ond inter­face only gets an IP address when the shared-IP zones on the machine are started, dur­ing boot the inter­face is plumbed but with­out any address. The net­works on those inter­faces are not con­nected and the machine is not a gate­way (this means we have a machine–admin­is­tra­tion net­work and a production-network). The sta­tic routes we want to have for the addresses of the zones are not added to the rout­ing table, because the next hop is not reach­able at the time the routing-setup is done. As soon as the zones are up (and the inter­face gets an IP), a re-run of the routing-setup adds the miss­ing sta­tic routes.

Unfor­tu­nately I can not tell Solaris to keep the sta­tic route even if the next hop is not reach­able ATM (at least I have not found an option to the route com­mand which does this).

One solu­tion to this prob­lem would be to add an address at boot to the inter­face which does not have an address at boot-time ATM (prob­a­bly with the dep­re­cated flag set). The prob­lem is, that this sub­net (/28) has not enough free addresses any­more, so this is not an option.

Another solu­tion is to use a script which re-runs the routing-setup after the zones are started. This is a prag­matic solu­tion, but not a clean solution.

As I under­stand the in.routed man-page in.routed is not an option with the default con­fig, because the machine shall not route between the net­works, and shall not change the rout­ing based upon RIP mes­sages from other machines. Unfor­tu­nately I do not know enough about it to be sure, and I do not get the time to play around with this. I have seen some inter­st­ing options regard­ing this in the man-page, but play­ing around with this and sniff­ing the net­work to see what hap­pens, is not an option ATM. Any­one with a config/tutorial for this “do not broad­cast any­thing, do not accept any­thing from outside”-case (if possible)?

As I already wrote, the­o­ret­i­cally ADSL RAM is avail­able at my place. The analy­sis of the sit­u­a­tion revealed first that the ISP side of my line uses out­dated hard­ware. After the tech­ni­cian I know unof­fi­cially took care about it (remotely switch­ing me to a dif­fer­ent port), I have seen an imme­di­ate improve­ment of the sig­nal to noise ratio. It is about 20 dB better.

Unfor­tu­nately this was not enough to be able to switch to the rate adap­tive mode. Accord­ing to their data­base the line length allows to give me 1.5 MBit. My line is run­ning already at 2 MBit and my ADSL modem tells me it could do 8 MBit, so I dis­agree a bit with their database.

As the tech­ni­cian agrees with me, the next step would be to tem­po­rary move my house by some hun­dred meters towards the ISP end­point of the line, unfor­tu­nately the higher man­age­ment seems to be hav­ing some busi­ness ideas with our region (FTTT, Fiber To The Town (which means we will prob­a­bly get 16 MBit via ADSL) … but maybe even FTTH), so they are now mon­i­tor­ing the data­base for such changes since a while.

I have the impres­sion they seem to pre­vent such changes to the data­base because they think that if peo­ple get 2 MBit (instead of noth­ing, large parts of a town nearby does not even have the slow­est ADSL con­nec­tion) or 8 MBit (instead of 2 MBit), they are not inter­ested in get­ting FTTH (or 16 MBit). Together with their IPTV ini­tia­tive I do not really under­stand it. To get their IPTV, you need to have at least a 8 MBit line. With 8 MBit you can only cover one TV at SD res­o­lu­tion (at least with their IPTV offer), if you want HD res­o­lu­tion, you need to switch to their VDSL stuff (which is not avail­able in our town). What peo­ple are doing cur­rently is to switch to a cable provider where they can get about 32 MBit (I do not switch, switch­ing is a risky action here, I rather stay with a slow con­nec­tion that to have no con­nec­tion at all for some months). With 32 MBit (and TV) peo­ple have less a need to switch to fiber (and pay 150 EUR for the work to get fiber into the house) than with 2 MBit or nothing.

The final out­come is, that the tech­ni­cian I know does not want to ask some­one to play with the data­base to move my house tem­po­rary (which I can under­stand). The good part of those news is, that I may get more than 8 MBit in the not so dis­tant future (the cur­rent plan­ning is to fin­ish the FTTT work until autumn).

I am now wait­ing since Decem­ber that my ADSL line is switched to the rate adap­tive mode (RAM). The­o­ret­i­cally it is pos­si­ble. Unfor­tu­nately the real­ity does not agree to this (yet).

Luck­ily I am not a nor­mal cus­tomer, I know a tech­ni­cian which works for my ISP. He could switch the line with­out prob­lems, but the next update of the sys­tem (which hap­pens from time to time) would can­cel this again, as each update “resets” the sta­tus to what is recorded in the DB. The prob­lem is, that he can not switch my line to RAM in the DB (actu­ally it is not him, he is a net­work tech­ni­cian not one of the sales peo­ple with access to the DB–inter­face). I am not the only cus­tomer where this is not pos­si­ble. So far they where not able to see a pattern.

Cur­rently there are two col­leagues of him, a friend of him and me which he has as good exam­ples where it does not work (there are more, but those are “just” reg­u­lar cus­tomers). We are now his toys, he wants to find out how to con­vince the sys­tem to switch to RAM in those cases. This needs a while, as parts of this need to go the offi­cial way until he sees if it works or not.

I am very happy that I am not just a nor­mal cus­tomer. This way it is much more trans­par­ent for me.

After read­ing Jim Get­tys inves­ti­ga­tions about the prob­lems cur­rent buffer sizes of net­work equip­ment pro­voke (which may even have impli­ca­tions in the net neu­tral­ity debate), I had a look at which active queue man­age­ment (AQM) algo­rithms with or with­out explicit con­ges­tion noti­fi­ca­tion (ECN) FreeBSD supports.

It looks like there is not much imple­mented (if the best solu­tion would be imple­mented, it would not mat­ter how much there is, but unfor­tu­nately there is no best solu­tion). Other sys­tems offer more. RED is imple­mented, but even the inventor/researcher of RED thinks the algo­rithm needs some improve­ments (he is in the process of prepar­ing a paper about this, as Jim Get­tys reveals). Blue/SFBlue is not imple­mented (a more turnkey-solution than the cur­rent RED imple­men­ta­tion). PID con­troller (which may or may not be some­thing some­one wants to use in this case… no idea about its pros/cons in this regard, but it is ref­er­enced in the AQM arti­cle on Wikipedia) is also not implemented.

Regard­ing ECN for FreeBSD you can find more or less no real doc­u­men­ta­tion in the net (at least with a sim­ple “ECN FreeBSD” search). It is imple­mented for the RED algo­rithm, but as the RED algo­rithm needs some tuning/setup, this is not a turnkey solu­tion. There is a ECN related sysctl, but I do not have the impres­sion that this is a turnkey-solution which mag­i­cally gen­er­ates ECN mes­sages with­out using dum­mynet for AQM.

From my cur­rent under­stand­ing (but I think I do not know a lot about this topic) it looks like AQM is a fea­ture most peo­ple would like to have acti­vated by default (with an appro­pri­ate algo­rithm which does not need tun­ing to pro­duce a good enough result). If this is cor­rect, it is a shame that FreeBSD does not acti­vate AQM with an algo­rithm which is not bad for most cases by default (with the option to change the algo­rithm and to dis­able com­pletely). If my under­stand­ing is not cor­rect, I would like to get a hit with the clue bat please.