[toc] Introduction About five years ago, I built two new servers in my basement, as outlined here and here. One server was my general login/mail/web/DNS/etc server, and the other my home NAS. This entry will document and detail my merging of the two servers into one, and the associated challenges that brought with it. I also took this opportunity to…
Author: Jason Van Patten
Home Networking: 10GigEth Upgrade
[toc] Introduction As documented in the last couple of Mac Pro entries, I’ve migrated some of my home networking to 10GigE. This blog entry will outline how that was done, the hardware used, and some of the work involved. The Old Setup My home office is on the second story of my house, while my basement has my servers, the…
Integrating The New Mac Pro
[toc] Introduction In my previous entry, I went through the new Mac Pro 7,1 that I just purchased. The intent of this post is to go over how I integrated the new machine in my office. Specifically how I fit it into my existing peripherals, displays, the mouse and keyboard, etc. I don’t expect this to be a long entry…
Mac Pro 2019
[toc] Introduction For the last almost seven years, I’ve been doing my amateur-hour level video editing and publishing on my PC. That wasn’t always the case though; prior to 2013 I was editing on a Mac Pro 5,1 model, that I’d heavily modified. Unfortunately with the launch of the Mac Pro 6,1, also known as the “trash can”, Apple pushed…
I Love My Job!
It’s been a bit of time since I’ve last written. The primary reason for that is that I’m just too busy at work. And I love it! Recall back at the end of May, I wrote this piece about good technical interviews. That interview was with IBM and it was for a network architecture role in the cloud side of…
Gear Whoring: No More Photography For Me
Another Random Brain Oozing, the topic of which is my failed journey through the hobby of photography and why I’m not going to return to it. The executive summary of it is: all I was really hot for was the gear. Not the art nor the results. Before I dive into that: I’m not going to be setting up a…
Running FRR On Home Router
[toc] Introduction I’ve been building up my Cumulus Linux and FreeBSD virtual network over the course of the last several months. As you’ll recall from an earlier post, I decided to put a single aggregation router at the top of the network as an ingress and egress point. This allowed me to put a single static route for the entire…
Good Tech Interviews
I had a fantastic interview today. I don’t yet know if I’ll get the role, but I’m feeling pretty confident about it. Even if I don’t, the interview itself went very well. Here’s why: The questions they asked. It’s really simple, actually. The three interviewers had scoured my resume and asked me questions that went along the lines of, “tell…
Final Health Checking Script
This is going to be a reasonably short and quick entry. Last week I went through the process of demonstrating using BGP Anycast on a server in place of a load balancer. The follow-up post described the health-checking script that I wrote in python to check whether the server was healthy or not. That health-checking script would then inject the…
Adding More ECMP and Health Checking To Anycast Lab
[toc] Introduction In yesterday’s Load Balancers Be Damned post, I demonstrated how adding Free Range Routing to servers could provide a way to do anycast load balancing without the need for expensive load balancers in some cases. What I didn’t really demonstrate well was the ECMP capabilities of the leaf nodes. I also punted on the required local health checking…