Performance Characterization of Suricata's Thread Models

In a previous project my fellow Amit Sheoran and I examined how well Suricata IDS runs inside Docker container and virtual machine environments. In April 2017, we further examined Suricata’s various thread models, as a project for Purdue CS525 Parallel Computing course. In this article we first introduce the thread models, and then compare them in terms of performance and resource utilization. Suricata’s Multi-Thread Architecture Compared to Snort IDS, the biggest feature of Suricata is that it adopts multi-threaded design to achieve high performance. Continue reading

Benchmarking Suricata in Different Isolation Systems Using TCPreplay

Containers like LXC are becoming a popular solution to program isolation. Compared to virtual machines (VM), containers tend to have less resource overhead and higher performance, which makes it interesting to explore how much benefit we can get from deploying virtual network functions (VNF) with containers instead of VMs. Therefore, we conducted an experiment in which we compared performance and resource usage of Suricata, a popular multi-threaded IDS program, in bare metal, Docker container, and virtual machine setups, and in different load levels and resource allocation configurations.

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onedrived - Microsoft OneDrive client for Linux

onedrived is a client program for Microsoft OneDrive on Linux platform. It enables you to sync local directories with remote OneDrive repositories (a.k.a., “Drive”) of one or more OneDrive Personal account (OneDrive for Business accounts are not yet supported).

The program is written in Python3, and uses official OneDrive Python SDK to communicate with OneDrive server, Keyring to securely store account credentials, and Linux inotify API to monitor file system changes.

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gitlab-ag - Combining Git and Autograding

Planned in December 2014 and first released in January 2015, gitlab-ag is a project that aims to enhance GitLab, an open-source GitHub-like system, for educational use. The primary goal is to facilitate batch operations on GitLab and integrate automated grading mechanism, thereby replacing the AutoGrader system used in the past. It runs as a standalone website that manipulates GitLab API. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/xybu/gitlab-ag Documentation: https://github.com/xybu/gitlab-ag/blob/master/README.md License: GPLv2 Features Import / delete users in batch: import students (GitLab users) from CSV when a new semester starts, and delete all users after semester ends. Continue reading

IE Cache Location and Metro App Crash

For very long time I have been creating RAM disk and pointing temp and cache dirs there to improve I/O performance and reduce unnecessary SSD writes. Since Windows 8, changing the cache location of IE (a.k.a. “Temporary Internet Files”) to a RAM disk could result in crashes of Metro (a.k.a. “Modern”) apps, which I didn’t figure out why until recently. The problem is also observable in Windows 10.

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Remove the AD of Outlook.com with Stylish

Outlook.com is a decent email service by Microsoft. I’ve been enjoying it and its past lives, but sometimes I feel the ad bar annoying…

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