Another Long Break It’s been a bit over a year since I’ve last written an entry. The primary reason for that is just that I got very busy with my day job. Part of that has included experimenting with the new Nvidia Bluefield-2 SmartNICs. I’m hoping my employer lets me write some generic-enough technical blog posts about what I’ve been…
Category: Server and OS
FRR Patched And Working
This entry will be another fairly quick one. In the previous entry regarding the server, routing, etc, I described how I had to work around the fact that FRR didn’t honor FreeBSD’s assigning and deletion of IP addresses from interfaces. Specifically: I had the line redistribute connected in the server’s BGP configuration. That means any of the server’s interfaces with…
The “Rackening” Is Complete
This is just a short update: In the previous post I described the overhaul of my little basement data center, but left it open as far as getting everything racked up cleanly. Between then and now, the 12RU rack arrived from Amazon, as did the rack rail kit for my 4RU server chassis. After assembling the rack in my basement,…
Server Merge, ZFS Fun, and BGP Routing For Jails
[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…
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…
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…
Load Balancers Be Damned: Routing On The Server
[toc] 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…
Cumulus VX on FreeBSD’s BHyve
[toc] Introduction Over the course of the last few weeks or so, I’ve been working with Cumulus Linux’s VX image on VirtualBox, on my Macbook Pro. As my virtual lab grew from a few VX images to the count of ten or so, my laptop began to complain. My laptop has a 4-core 2.8Ghz Core i7 with 16GB of RAM. …
Proper IT Security: Build a Fort Not a Prison
Like the rest of the posts on this blog, this is an opinion piece based on my 2+ decades on the industry. Some will agree, others will disagree. Let’s get started. Definition of IT Security When I say “IT security”, I specifically mean that which secures your office place. The PCs, laptops, Macs, and the networking that your employees use…