Routers are basically embedded devices (or system), and most modern routers run on linux. Think of it like a mini computer that has its own cpu, storage space, ram memory, ethernet ports, wifi chipset, and optionally a usb port. Functionally these are single board computers similar to a raspberry pi. They software that runs on… Read More »
Lets say you upgraded your home or office network with new wifi routers and devices then you should see if your devices are using the new wifi standards like Wifi5 or Wifi6, to ensure high speed data transfer. On Windows it is easy to check, but on linux we need to run a few commands… Read More »
On a linux system you can get details about the wifi adapter using commands like iw, iwconfig, iwlist, ethtool etc. However if you are a usb wifi adapter then it can be tricky. When you plug a usb wifi adapter on your system, linux will not show the details of the device in the lspci… Read More »
In this article we take a quick look at testing wifi throughput over lan using a simple tool called iperf. Wifi lan speed matters when you are transferring large files across devices. For example transferring a big video or zip file from ipad or smartphone to desktop pc connected on ethernet. Wifi speed is not… Read More »
After you install Ubuntu inside VirtualBox its necessary to install guest additions in order to enable enhanced features like native screen resolution, seamless windows, shared clipboard, shared folders and few others. Without it, you would probably have to work with a standard resolution like 1024×768 as the default virtual machine does not support every possible… Read More »
OpenVPN OpenVPN is open source, secure and robust. It is readily available for most platforms and can be setup quickly. The SurfShark native client also uses OpenVPN underneath. It supports both tcp and udp based wrappers for vpn traffic over internet. UDP is significantly faster than tcp and works really well. There are multiple ways… Read More »
DNS Leak DNS Leak is commonly seen in vpn connections, when all the http traffic goes through the vpn tunnel, however the dns queries go directly to system/isp dns servers bypassing the vpn tunnel, which breaks the privacy protection offered by the vpn. Unless dns leaks are fixed, you are not fully privacy guarded in… Read More »
The 7z LZMA benchmark runs dummy compression and decompression tasks to measure the overall performance of the system. It reports measurements in MIPS (million instructions per second) which give an idea of the computer’s raw processing power counting all factors. 7z LZMA compression is a multi-threaded work-load. This means that it can utilise multiple cores… Read More »
Sysbench is a command-line tool that is designed to test and benchmark database performance, but with certain options it can also be used to run tests to measure the raw performance of cpu, ram and storage devices as well. These tests can give a brief and fairly accurate assessment of the system’s performance. In this… Read More »
What are UEFI and BIOS These are specifications that describe and define how the system firmware should work to initialize the hardware and load the OS. In old systems we had the IBM PC “derived” BIOS implementations. Its the blue screen interface that you enter by pressing the Del/F2 keys just AFTER system power has… Read More »