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…
Author: Jason Van Patten
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
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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
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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…
Load Balancers Be Damned: Routing On The Server
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Introduction Companies such as F5, A10, and Netscaler (owned by Citrix) have built their respective businesses on the need for load balancing devices in the data center and other parts of the network. While these devices can make the sharing of the load of incoming service connections (eg: HTTP, DNS, etc) very easy, they also come with a sometimes…
Dice Breaks SLI in Battlefield V (Again)
Just a quick post. A short while ago, I wrote this post on how to get SLI working in Battlefield V. Dice released a new Battlefield V patch as of 13 February, 2019. In it, they attempted to deal with the Level of Detail (LOD) cheaters. I’m not going to go into the details of what the LOD cheat entails,…
Current PC Audio Setup
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Introduction I’ve spent a lot of years building up the audio setup on my gaming/editing PC. The parts are listed in the “Audio” section of this page. I figured I’d write up a long post describing what’s connected to what, why I did it the way I did, and the reason for purchasing the things I have. Bear in…
Battlefield V and NVidia SLI: Making It Work
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Introduction The release of Battlefield V hasn’t gone without quite a number of hitches. From various annoying bugs, to Dice’s incessant fiddling with weapon balance and damage models. And we’re only about a month in to it as of this writing. However, one important thing for those of us using NVidia’s SLI technology is: there’s no support for it. …