DOCUMENTATION 》 TOFFEE-Butterscotch a TOFFEE for Home/SOHO Internet/WAN bandwidth

I started working on the new TOFFEE project (which is the fork of my earlier TrafficSqueezer open-source project) starting from 1st January 2016 onwards. Ever since I was busy in research and altering certain old features so that it is more minimal than TrafficSqueezer, a more focused agenda, deliver refined code and a broader vision. I have lined up more things to follow in the upcoming months. I want to focus about all aspects of WAN communication technologies not just on core WAN Optimization research and technology.

Earlier the TOFFEE is intended to work on IoT devices, Satellite Networks, branch office/SOHO deployments. In most cases the users may deploy just one or couple of TOFFEE devices per site. But in the case of TOFFEE-DataCenter, users can scale-up deploying the same in multiple servers in a sort of distributed cluster computing scenario. Besides the core TOFFEE-DataCenter components (such as packet processing engine/framework), I need to do lot of changes in its Graphical User Interface (GUI) too to address these new requirements.

The TOFFEE Project :: TOFFEE-Mocha :: Linux Open-Source WAN Emulator

I started TOFFEE-Mocha WAN Emulation software development on 1-June-2016. I took the existing TOFFEE components as a base. Although the TOFFEE-Mocha is entirely an independent fresh Open-Source WAN Emulation solution. Ever since I am in the process of defining and inventing features. So far I come up with the most important feature which is expected to be present in any WAN Emulation software is the packet delay option.

Currently what we have is a single homogeneous (sort of) WWW Internet. Which we can consider as a single-dimensional network. What I propose is that we can create complete independent multiple Internets with each Internet having its own IP-address space, Domain namespace and an authority to manage Domain names. And these networks/Internets can be entirely IPv4 only based or IPv6 only based.

My 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM hard-drive suddenly started making mild clicking noise. I found this happening since morning. I was suspicious that something wrong in this drive and when I opened the Linux Disks app, I can find the cause of this issue. The disk is increasingly getting read errors. Besides I can see various other parameters such as Power-On Hours, Temperature, Head flying hours, etc.

When you build a WAN Optimization device with TOFFEE the entire packet processing (data optimization) takes place in software layer or in other words more precisely Operating System kernel space. However if you have any compression or encryption hardware accelerator hardware card the parts of the TOFFEE packet processing modules can be offloaded to hardware layer and thus improving its efficiency.

Today I got a feature request from Jonathan Withers. Jonathan is from a company called MultiWave Australia. He said he is able to get the TOFFEE-Mocha Raspberry Pi setup up and with that he is able to emulate geostationary satellite link. But he requested me is there a way to extend the constant packet delay from 40mS to 500mS. So as a part of his request I supported the same in the current ongoing development version of TOFFEE-Mocha.

Assume you have two sites (such as Site-A and Site-B) connected via slow/critical WAN link as shown below. You can optimize this link by saving the bandwidth as well possibly improve the speed. However, the WAN speed can be optimized only if the WAN link speeds are below that of the processing latency of your TOFFEE installed hardware. Assume your WAN link is 12Mbps, and assume the maximum WAN optimization speed/capacity of Raspberry Pi is 20Mbps, then your link will get speed optimization too. And in another case, assume your WAN link is 50Mbps, then using the Raspberry Pi as WAN Optimization device will actually increase the latency (i.e slows the WAN link). But in all the cases the bandwidth savings should be the same irrespective of the WAN link speed. In other words, if you want to cut down the WAN link costs via this WAN Optimization set up, you can always get it since it reduces the overall bandwidth in almost all the cases (including encrypted and pre-compressed data).

Seems there are couple of Inmotionhosting servers are down. And one of the server includes The TOFFEE Project website hosted server. I was in touch with the Inmotionhosting team trying to resolve the same. I found a unique issue that all my website files are intact and the Joomla database. But the Joomla database tables are completely wiped out and missing. Besides there is also a sort of upgrade going on in their servers. Luckily I have the most recent backup of the entire website.