FreeBSD, Network Architecture, Server and OS

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…

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PC Gaming

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…

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PC Gaming

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. …

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PC Gaming

Game Streaming: Full Circle

This is just a quick entry to wrap up my adventure with online streaming.  It started like anything does: with nothing but an idea.  I wanted to see if I could understand and figure out the technology behind streaming.  I started on YouTube because they allow a near infinite upload bandwidth (turns out: it’s 51Mbit/sec) which made it possible for…

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Network Architecture

Automating Cumulus With Ansible and ZTP

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Introduction In the last few of my blog entries, I discussed setting up a virtual lab using Cumulus’ VX image for VirtualBox.  I then went through and got EVPN working, and finally showed how using VXLAN, we can consider dumping MPLS for L2VPNs.  This entry will focus on automating the bring-up of a new switch running Cumulus, and it’ll…

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Network Architecture

Deploying Firewalls With Routing

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Introduction State-tracking firewall devices are commonly deployed at the border of data centers, office networks, and other corporate environments where precious IP needs to be kept out of the hands of others.  My opinion of these firewall devices is that they should be avoided at all costs, and I’ll get into that later.  Sometimes we’re forced to deploy things…

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Network Architecture

EVPN and VXLAN on Cumulus

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Introduction and Purpose Introduction Almost three years ago, I wrote this long and detailed post about building a VXLAN-enabled virtual lab on a KVM hypervisor, using Arista’s vEOS image.  Prior to that, I also wrote up this post regarding the ideas around using VXLAN for spanning L2 across an L3 infrastructure.  In the second post, I wrote about the…

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