2024–W51 #
Wow, it's week 51.
I've spent a bunch of time working with BGP and IPv6, joining DN42 (as AS4242422552 -- rolls off of the tongue!). I've got iBGP between my house and Montreal, and eBGP between my Wales VM and a peer in Frankfurt. I have BGP between Wales and Montreal working (technically) but the packets don't route correctly because of how I've set up the tunnels etc.
I think the wisest thing is to set up WireGuard tunnels on the VMs themselves, rather than trying to make tunnels created in the KVM host (the Dom0, as it were) visible in a reliable way to the VMs. (Previously I was exposing a bridge device which contained a VXLAN which was itself tunnels over WireGuard. Too messy.)
I'm going to set up Babel for distributing internal routes through the IGP -- as much as a test as anything else. Probably iBGP or frankly a lot of static routes would actually work. I will not be readvertising BGP routes into Babel as I don't think that's really what it's for and I can cover the whole DN42 network with a couple of network statements / static advertisements.
Been fun, though.
Also on the verge of getting PD's and my company set up and registered to start doing networking "for real" again. In honor of that I'm getting some of the equipment I might want to colocate up to shape. I currently have a 10G PCIe NIC in the HP DL360e and I'm using the onboard RAID/SATA controller connected to the first four ports in the front disk backplane. The other PCIe slot has a carrier for an NVMe SSD which is currently vacant as I nabbed it for something else.
I think I'd like to end up with 2xSSD and 2xHDD (2TiB) out of the working ports on the front (possible with the internal card) but I'm also considering if getting a card with an external SAS connector would be a good idea. That would allow attaching a cheap(ish) disk shelf to this machine to make it a bit of a powerhouse really. But it's also a lot of eggs in one basket, vs. just building a NAS-style device with the backplane internal to it, if I/we want a lot of bunch HDD storage.
Much to think about.