This article discusses the experiences over the past year at Laurentian University in deploying a Linux live CD solution to create customized kiosk browsers on ‘quick lookup’ laptops. This provides security, reliability, ease of use, and improved response time compared to other options. We explain why we chose this solution, reveal techniques we used to achieve some of our goals, and reflect on possible future iterations of this project.

Wireless broadband networks (such as WiMAX) provide more bandwidth for video streaming applications. However, too many streaming services over WiMAX would lead to congestion in the wireless links. How to relax the traffic on WiMAX links and provide users with a better QoS of streaming services is a worthy studying problem. In this thesis, we propose packet replication and duplication mechanisms for video streaming with the same connection requests to decrease traffic load over WiMAX links. Besides, we propose admission control and low-priority dropping mechanisms for video streaming with different priority levels. We reject low-priority video requests to guarantee QoS for high-priority video streams. If the network is congested, we decrease the bit rate through statistically dropping the low-priority video packets, which consequently improves the quality of high-priority video streams. A subscriber gateway is implemented on Linux platform to demonstrate the above-mentioned three mechanisms. In the implementations, we classified the video priority levels and developed a scheme to drop low-priority packets in a multimedia streaming server. Finally, from the experimental results, we have shown that our mechanisms can decrease the traffic load over WiMAX links and provide users with different levels of service quality in multimedia streaming.

Dresden, Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2005.

Implementation of block device drivers in userspace of modern general-purpose operating systems, although possible, is fairly uncommon, poorly supported and usually achieves only low performance. Being able to implement high- performance drivers in userspace with ease would allow for faster iterations in storage research and would make it possible to design block devices which operate in radically different ways. In this thesis, we present Block Device in Userspace (BUSE), a Linux ker- nel module and communication protocol which makes it easy to develop userspace block-device drivers. Compared to the existing approaches, BUSE can scale on modern multicore architectures and provides at least 7x higher throughput with significantly simpler setup. Furthermore, the kernel module communicates with the userspace driver through shared memory, eliminating an extraneous memory copy. BUSE also solves the write-after-write and read- after-write consistency issues which stem from the use of multiple hardware queues in the Linux storage stack, allowing the implementation to focus on the domain of the problem. As a proof-of-concept, we implemented Block Device in S3 (BS3), a userspace block device implementation backed by Amazon S3 (or any other S3-compatible storage) on top of BUSE. BS3 can be used as a generic disk...

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Firewall testing is important because fifewall faults can lead to security failures. Firewall testing is hard because firewall rules havdp&a+eters, producing a huge number of possible parameter combinations. This thesis presents a firewall testing methodology based on test templates, which are parameterized test cases. A firewall testing framework for iptables, the Linux firewall subsystem, has been implemented. Twelve test templates have been created for testing iptables parameters and extensions. A GUI tool is also provided to integrate these test templates with various test generation strategies. The most important of these strategies, painvise generation, has been investigated in detail. Based on the investigation, we developed an improved painvise generation algorithm.

This thesis is motivated by development of The Wearable Personal Data Information Capture System (WPDICS), which is used to support the "physical" data stream requirement on a person as they experience daily life, including visual and audio information. To fit the acquirement of "wearable", the system should be very tiny in size and very low cost. Our purpose is to conduct a feasibility analysis for WPDICS using commercially available components (Sharp Zaurus SL 5600 Linux PDA) and evaluate the acquisition of "physical" data streams grabbed by this component. In the thesis, we also develop some software test the data acquisition, especially audio and visual data.

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