Posts

Introduction In the past, I have worked with proprietary firewalls (Stormshield, Arkoon, Netasq). The experience was rather mixed: the whole thing is hard to debug, updates are gated behind licenses, prices are excessive, and there are many technical limitations. So many reasons to rule out proprietary gear for this kind of design, in favor of a Linux-based solution (FRR, BGP, nftables): open source, innovation, and independence. The idea: a hub-and-spoke design where the firewalls play the role of hub, and nobody talks to anyone without going through them. ...

The SatNOGS Network Project The goal of the SatNOGS project, as its “about” page indicates, is to have a global network of ground stations. An interface allows you to manage your station, observations, etc. The observations are freely accessible to anyone who wishes. It is possible to participate in the project by installing one or more stations, which allows access to other features, such as scheduling observations on your own station or on others'. ...

I manage virtualization servers, and we have full control over the hypervisors. The administration of the virtual machines is handled by the clients. Ubuntu is the most commonly used operating system on our virtual machines. We deploy them using cloud images. The initial configuration is managed by cloud-init, which takes care of networking and SSH keys. It also automatically installs the qemu-guest-agent package. Running a virt-inspector on the image we use provides us with details about this package. ...

I operate servers where we use BGP (EVPN - VXLAN). The architecture is similar to the one described by Vincent Bernat. The hypervisors act as routers for the VMs. When I designed the addressing plan, I used IPv4/IPv6 networks in /24 and /64 respectively with the gateway VIPs positioned on the first available IP: 10.0.0.1/24 and fdc0:3489:e0fd::/64. This topology has been working perfectly for 2 years. Recently, we had to deploy a dedicated VM for interconnecting two VRFs. We use iBGP sessions for route exchange between a VM and a hypervisor. ...