Tiernan's Comms Closet

Geek, Programmer, Photographer, network egineer…

Monthly Archives June 2016

Meraki and Ubiquiti networks gear Update

In part 6 of my Double Internet Series I mentioned i was running a Meraki MX64 in the network, and said i would write up about it. I am taking this opportunity to also write up about the Ubiquiti networks gear in the house also.

  • First on the list is my older Ubiquiti Edgerouter POE. It currently in the process of being decommissioned, or used for something else. It was the main edge router for the network: it had both internet connections connected, and did routing, firewalls, etc, but with the Proliant taking over as a router, it is not required as much any more… Its still on, mainly because its still a DHCP server, but not much else.
  • There are 2 Meraki MS220-8 switches next. GodBox1 and Godbox2 both connect in here, and are bonded, as is everything else on the network. The MS220-8 has 8 GigE ports, but also has 2 SFP ports. I bought 4 SFP Ethernet adapters and have a short calbe running between the switches. That uplink is also bonded. All going well so far!
  • All Meraki hardware can be managed though the Meraki dashboard. check out their site for more details and examples of how to use it.
  • I bought one of the MS220’s from eBay a few months back, and loved it. Then i realized that you can get your hands on free gear, the MX64, an MS220 and a Wi-Fi Access point if you attend their webinars. Terms and conditions apply, but check them out!
  • I have 2 Ubiquiti UniFi APs, one in the front of the house, one in the back. They are connected to one of the MS220’s, but dont work with its POE (maybe the EdgeRouter could do that, since its POE…) so there are injectors for them. Anyway, the network ports on there are VLANed to the MX64 (more on that later) and the default traffic is going to a management VLAN.
  • The MX64 has a static internal IP on my DMZ network, and uses the Proliant as an upstream connection. Upstream on the Hetzner server, all traffic coming from the MX64 ip uses one of my /29 ip block. all traffic to that ip is also forwarded directly to the MX64.
  • I has 2 small, unmanaged switches (a cheap 8 port Linksys and a 8 port TP Link) which are used for separate things: the Linksys has 4 Raspberry Pi’s, which run a GlusterFS cluster, plugged into it and the TP Link connects to my printers.
  • I also have a Mikrotik CRS226-24G-2S+IN which has 2 10Gbit SFP+ Ports, and plan on using this for higher speed networking soon, aswell as a Cisco 48 port 3560 which also has 4 SFP ports (GigE) and may come in handy for something soon…

So, thats the network currently. any questions, please leave a comment.

double speed Internet Part 8 – Routing Around

[NOTE] This part 8 in a series of posts. The rest can be found here.

At the end of my last post I asked the question about routing traffic to different servers based on thier distances, etc… Well, after a bit of messing, i can say it kind of works! here is a quick over view:

  • server in the house has now got multiple OpenVPN connections (2 to Hetzner, 1 to OVH (with a plan to double), 1 to Digital Ocean (again, to be doubled) and i am planning 2 to Azure as well).
  • Quagga/Zebra has static routes (currently static, planing on dynamic soon… more eventually) to different servers depending on where they are. for example, all traffic to the hetzner network (including their Storage Boxes) go though the hetzner link. Hubic traffic goes though OVH, Azure (currently) and AWS traffic, aswell as some CDNs go direct over either WAN1 or WAN2 in the house, and some other stuff (CrashPlan currently) goes though Digital Ocean. Everything that has no static route goes though Hetzner…
  • Ideally, the static side of things should be removed, and a more dynamic setup done. How that works, i have no idea… Spotify have 2 posts about their SDN Internet Router (part 1 and part 2) which is an interesting idea… More digging and research is required.

So, there you have it. Everything currently seems to be working, mostly, and tweaks can be made easily… I have a couple posts i have in my head, including something to do with automating bringing up new machines (probably with Ansible or something like it), more monitoring, and some other stuff too… Any questions, leave a comment, and i will get back.

[UPDATE] I wrote a quick and dirty app called WhoIsToZebraConfig which takes an AS Number, looks up the info in the Merit RADb (with the help of some code from Coder Buddy) and outputs what you need to put into your Zebra Config… should save me some time, and it might save you time too… shout if you have questions!