Tiernan's Comms Closet

Geek, Programmer, Photographer, network egineer…

Currently Viewing Posts Tagged mikrotik

Day 57 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 57 of and its a link dump for today:

Day 49 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 49 of , and I missed this yesterday, but it’s only going to be a link dump… And todays link dump is mostly Mikrotik gear! Some of these are a little cringy (looking at your Solid Rack video) But hilarious nonetheless! Some of these are so new, they don’t even seem to have product pages, just videos announcing them…

Day 48 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 48 of and I have been out of commission for the last couple of days… Havnt been well… cold and flu-like symptoms, but luckily, not Covid… Haven’t done a major amount, so it’s mostly links for today, but I did try a few projects and installed them. Links for those are below.

Day 46 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 46 of and I haven’t had much time to work on the homelab this weekend, but have had some time using it, somewhat indirectly… Plex, Netflix and Disney Plus streaming, etc. Internet is more stable (but not 100%… more messing on that part soon) and the RB5009 is definitely more stable (IPv6 BGP is currently off, and only using 5 of my 14ish BGP sessions I could use… I think 1Gb RAM is struggling, or my filters are wrong… Hopefully, it’s a filter thing, that way I can sort it out without new hardware.

Day 41 of #100daysofhomelab

Going to be a very quick update here. Things are a little more stable at the moment. I figured out why my FTTH connection was acting up… the VM I moved it too had the default free 1Mb/s license for RouterOS… After moving my unlimited CHR license over, things have gotten better. screenshots over on my mastodon instance:

So, today, not doing much other than monitoring… I am taking a day of rest and will be back tomorrow…

Day 40 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 40 of #100daysofhomelab and the internet is a little more stable… Still not 100%, but “stable”.  Speed test results have dropped, as you can see in the graph below, but weirdly, ping times are a little better…

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Download speeds. The swap over happened around the 8th Feb, 9th was pretty much a wash, 10th things got a bit better…

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Upload Speeds. less spikey upload speeds, but also less upload speed…

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ping times went from around 38-40ms to around 28-30ms… 

I currently have Observium watching the traffic on the routers, and all logs are being written to an ELK stack. Not correctly (links below on how it *should* work, but I don’t have it fully working… yet) but they are being logged nonetheless.

 

Day 38 and 39 of #100daysofhomelab

this post is for day 38 and 39 of #100daysofhomelab… and i have finally moved over to my #RB5009… and, well, it has not gone so well… It has rebooted a few times due to memory issues (too many BGP tables being held, so I shut a few down to start with… some cleanup needed there), then the internet connections are a little unstable, and, well, in the last 48 hours, I have spent more time on LTE than on proper internet… It does seem to be working (ish…) now, but not as fast as it was. I am just using the #Zerotier link, so the #Wireguard links are currently off… Anyway, below are some links… I hope to make things work better tomorrow… And i also hope to have a better write up soon too…

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Day 31 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 31 of and I am going through the config from my CHR to bring over to my RB5009, and, well, I have no idea what I was doing when I built the original config… Now to try and figure out what the config did, since I want to document it here so I know what I was thinking, but to also possibly help someone else… Mind you, at this stage, it won’t be much help… I also need to figure out how to add my Zerotier Bridge into the mix.

So, as trying to get a high level overview of how this works, lets start with this:

  • The cable modem comes in at 1Gb/s down, 50Mb/s up. It hands off at 1Gb ethernet and plugs into a switch on VLAN 900. Anything on VLAN 900 can get a public IP from that modem (statically assigned, I have 5 usages, the first being the modem to act as a gateway).
  • FTTH comes in and goes to my small quad 2.5Gb box, which then, using CHR (we call this DUB1-BK01), hands off a /29 to VLAN 905. Again, any devices on VLAN 905 can get a public IP from there, and use BK01 as a gateway.
  • For the current CHR (DUB1-BGP01) it being a VM has currently got 3 connections: eth1 is connected to VLAN900, eth2 is connected to VLAN905 and eth3 is connected to VLAN901. VLAN901 has a /27 from my block of /24 addresses, and anything on that VLAN can use an IP from that pool and the IP from DUB1-BGP01 as its gateway.
  • DUB1-BGP01 does some BGP routing to my upstream servers. lon1, which is based in Vultr London, and fra3, which is based in M&M Networks in Frankfurt Germany. lon1 has transit from Vultr and fra3 gets transit from M&M Networks, but also connects to multiple Internet Exchanges: DE-CIX Frankfurt, DE-CIX Dusseldorf, DE-CIX Hamburg, DE-CIX Munich, KleyReX, LocIX and LocIX Dusseldorf. More details of the network and peers, etc, are available on as204994.net.
  • DUB1-BGP01 connects to both lon1 and fra3 over WireGuard connections. All traffic to lon1 is sent over the Cable Modem link. All traffic to fra3 is sent over the FTTH link. Currently, there is no automatic failover if one link dies… This is where (hopefully) Zerotier comes into play.
  • I have a VM running on my i7 2.5Gb box that has connections to both VLAN900 and VLAN905, along with VLAN911. I have a bridge on that box that connects VLAN911 to a Zerotier network which is used only for internal peering. It has a /28 Public IP Range and anything on that bridge can use an IP from that network and talk to other machines. Currently that bridge is directly connected to my UDM Pro, and it gets a public IP and uses fra3 as a gateway. Sometimes traffic goes though fra3 but comes back over lon1 (due to asymmetric routing). But because of the way the network is working, all traffic can flow without issues.
  • The plan is to use that VLAN along with the 2 WireGuard links and give me 2 connections to lon1 and fra3. In theory, if one connection goes down, the traffic should be able to flow the other way…

So, at least that is the theory… How well this will work is anyone’s guess… But more messing with configs is required.

Day 30 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 30 of and I tried to look into getting my RB5009 setup, and well… it has the wrong power supply! EU, not UK/Ireland… More messing is required! [Update] Found the right supply, but fell asleep watching TV… more messing tomorrow…

 

Day 29 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 29 of #100daysofhomelab and my RB5009 finally arrived! The bad news is I am up to my eyes with some out-of-hours updates for my $DayJob… So, it will probably be tomorrow or Friday before I get to it… It’s been that kind of a day. I am OOF from Friday to next Wednesday, so I should have plenty of time to play with. I also started playing around with Tailscale Funnel. I got my hands on an invite, and it looks like I can invite other people to it… If you are interested, leave a comment. I have not actually done much with it, mostly reading the docs and testing it before i make it public… But should be interesting. Anyway, now for some links.