Toerless Eckert

Hippo torture club

Former member of the Staff of the Computing Center (RRZE) and the IMMD-IV.

Sorry, no time to comprehensively update this page. Just random bits of mostly obsolete information here.

General disclaimer

This homepage has not been updated now for about a decade except for contact information. One of these days i will get around to it (04/2008). Still not updated (01/2014). This homepage contains pointers to a few of those of my ressources and projects that i have most often been bugged about ( ...where can i find... ) and information on how to contact me. Information on what i did can be found on my CV pages.

Ressources

Disclaimer: The ressources described below were once programmed and maintained by me. Don't blame me, if they don't work any longer, i don't know who maintains them now, and experience shows that complex installations deteriorate quickly if not fed with proper maintenance (mostly because their environment changes).

BHN
Supporting the Bavarian higher-education network (BHN) was once part of my job at the university. The (minimal) WWW-server i ran for it, can be found on www.bhn.de. I admit that it is quite boring, because it was never meant to provide information to a general public at large. Instead it was most often used by administrators to check out their networks reachability from the backbone with the graphical status tool.
If you want to get an impression what the BHN looks like in terms of routers & switches deployed and how it fits into the B-WiN, take a look into the directory netzplaene on the ftp server for the BHN. It contains several postscript-file versions of a large (A1/A0) sized poster that i once designed to outline the BHN's structure. The poster contains a lot of explanations, which unfortunately are all in german. Try ftp://ftp.bhn.de/netzplaene/bhn-win-plan-0598-A1.ps , that version should be quite up to date (as of Q3'/1998), but you still need a large printer to view it in full detail).
FAU-TV
There is actually some fun stuff hidden on www.bhn.de, which is to say, it hosts the web pages through which FAU-TV is controlled and programmed. FAU-TV is our "TV head-station". basically, it's a TV satellite downlink with a turnable dish. The signal is continuously fed into parts of the german MBone and the FAU cable-TV network. It's only one channel at a time, but you can switch the channel via WWW or reserve a program like on a VCR. Sounds good, does it not ? It's only frustrating if you cannot receive it because you are not within MBone reach of it, and that is why the FAU-TV homepage is somewhat hidden (although it's distributed via SDR on Mbone). Here's the homepage http://www.bhn.de/baywatch/fau-tv.

Slides

BHN meeting 18.7.1996 Rosenheim (8 slides - GERMAN).
Preliminary information about planned multicasting setup for BHN Universities.

Networld+Interop'95 conference in Frankfurt:IP Multicasting and the MBONE (17 slides - ENGLISH).
A little bit more about multicast routing protocols.

ONLINE'96 conference in Hamburg: IP Multicasting und der MBone - Videokonferenzen im Internet (about 19 slides - GERMAN).
Many slides on the Mbone applications.

Netzwerkausbildung am RRZE WS 96/77: Multicasting
30 slides, GERMAN, quite detailed multicasting basics: IP, GARP/GMRP, ATM.

Projects and Tools

The following chapter lists some software projects of my students and me.

DATlib
is a software library to provide improved access to DDS drives via SCSI. It was especially made to support Audio-DAT access with Python/Scorpion type DDS drives from Seagate. It currently runs on Sun Solaris, but should be easy to port to other unix variants too too (first steps are made). Datlib can be found in
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/local/inf4/DATlib
DATlib was mostly written by Marcus Meissner as a Studienarbeit (practical thesis).
DoubleX
is a simple software and hardware solution to connect more than one set of keyboard, mouse and frame buffer to a Sun workstation so that it can be used as a local desktop under X for two users. It can be found in
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/local/inf4/eckert/doubleX
The hardware adapter for DoubleX comes from my collegue Jürgen Weigert.
vic.FAU
is an improved version of the VIC-2.8 video conferencing tool. It includes enhanced support for Parallax XVideo and Osprey-1x00/SunVideo+ frame buffer interface cards as well as a couple of other minor improvements. The current version of vic.FAU can be found in
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/local/inf4/vic.FAU
vic.FAU was written by Marcus Meissner as a Diplomarbeit (master thesis) and Stefan Behlert as a Studienarbeit (practical thesis).
WARNING vic.FAU comes without documentation, we hope to change this soon.
x86setser is a small tool that allows you to change the hostid on a Solaris-X.86 machine to a new randomn value. Creating new hostids is necessary when new Solaris-X.86 clients are created by cloning disks from a prototype-client. X86setser was written 1998 by me and is available from
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/local/inf4/eckert/x86setser

More recent work

14th Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM) 2018 (in Rome).
High-Performance Networking (HIPNET) workshop paper an presentation:
"Preferred Path Routing (PPR) Graphs - Beyond Signaling Of Paths To Networks" (presentation).
Paper to be published on IEEE explorer.

The software to some other projects is also on my ftp-homepage, but it's totally undocumented. Feel free to browse.

Old stuff

19.12.1997: Lecture on VIC for Parallax/Osprey-1x00 (german only !!).

Addresses

	Home @ USA
	Toerless Eckert 505 Cypress Point Dr., Unit 272 Mountain View, CA. 94043 USA
	`+1 650 567 9767`
	`+1 650 576 5619` (cell)
	Electronic Mail
	toerless.eckert@informatik.uni-erlangen.de (private) tte@cs.fau.de (private - shorter alias)
	IRC
	TTE on channel #erlangen on efnet