I did so much last week that I didn't have time to write it up for week notes.
Mostly, a bunch of time went on hardware things. I bought 3x dual 10GB NICs, thinking I could arrange them into a ring network using Linux bridge devices. (Spanning Tree would stop it creating an actual loop). I bought three DAC cables to go with them.
Only one of the cards worked, which was a pain, so I ended up getting a different, Intel-based, one and putting that in my storage machine. So only one hop of my network is 10G, but that's okay. I get about 480Mbit/s over the link. I am not sure what the bottleneck is; a topic for future study.
While I had the 1U HP server open I decided to swap out the hardware RAID controller for an NVMe drive on a PCI add-in card. This meant moving from SAS to SATA -- I could plug the SFF/Mini-SAS cable into a convenient slot on the motherboard, but the internal B120 controller can only do SATA. But I have SATA SSDs, so I think swapping a RAID of battery-backed 10K RPM disks for a single SSD is probably at least a draw if not an improvement.
I bought a cheap motherboard to stick into that 1U case, thinking I might need a router soon, along with a PCIe extension for the 10GB NIC. Well -- the motherboard arrived but the clearance it needs at the bottom is more than the stand-offs on the case allow for, and if I lift it up then the lid on the case won't fit. Awesome. And that's without adding the cooler. I thought I had an 1155 compatible cooler but I didn't, so that went on the shopping list too.
Having bought this motherboard to complete the case I already have, I will probably end up buying a 2U case. Life's funny like that sometimes!
In software I also set up a fresh Wireguard VPN and then put a VXLAN over that and BGP over that, using FRR. FRR is the modern-day successor to Quagga (itself a successor to Zebra) so it's familiar territory. I can't wait to be speaking BGP for real. I also dug out an article I wrote on how to do high-availability services using BGP. It's gone from the original iWeb blog so I found a copy on Wayback. 12 years!