I have recently stumbled across DN42 and have been fairly excited to transition my networking know how from layer 3 meshing via OLSR (back in the NTFreenet days) to now understanding more of complex enterprise networks.

What better way to learn about such things than to:

1. Install a complex enterprise network in your own home
2. Make sure you have outage sensitive customers on the network. Any Wife, kids or friends will usually do

And so with this in place I introduce my humble home lab.

Details

The network is so far comprised of:

• 2x Ubiquiti ERL
• 2x Ubiquiti Rocket M2
• 1x Cisco SG200-26
• 1x Linksys SLM2008
• 1x Fritzbox 7270 + Fritzfon DECT handset
• 1x Asus WL500GPV2
• 1x Netcomm NB6PLUS4
• 1x Dovado GO + Seirra Wireless 320U

There are also some servers

• 1x SmartOS host - 2x gbit nics plus 1x IPMI
• 1x QNAP TS-410 - 2x gbit nics

And finally some 11 clients between wired clients, mobile clients and media devices.

Layer 1 and 2

Things a pretty boring here. You can see most of the detail already in the picture at the start of this post. None the less here is the documentation for my benifit.

I have not really found a cleaner way for this short of tables so you will have to suffer through or suggest a better alternative!

Bedroom

NB6PLUS4

Office

ERL-01

ERL-02

SG200-26

Lounge

SLM2008

In the next installment we will describe the layer 3 networks!

Heres a short post for today. A while back I remember being very excited to see that asciiflow.com had updated their platform and the tool had become far richer.

What I did not realise at the time was that the source code which once use to be available had vanished from the internet (aka github). I am not exactly sure what the motivation for this would be since its either a thinly veiled attempt to siphon up technical details from those less security concious or just a plain change of heart. Either way it left me feeling fairly disappointed in the project.

Learning to love perl - asciio

After being faced with the need to document things quickly and in an ever changing way I went on the hunt for a replacement to asciiflow and I found asciio lurking in the Fedora repositories.

I’ve been using asciio now for a few weeks and can say that this application is simply awesome! A GTK interface to interact with layer based ascii diagrams is exactly what I was after. Most particularly I can be confident that these documents stay with me and my /dev/sda.

Some assembly required

There is mostly undocumented feature in the save and save as function. That being the all documents saved with .txt extension are NOT able to be loaded as these are the ascii exports.

To save a document to reuse give it another extension. Personally I have used .asciio to keep things obvious and not had any future trouble. Details are in BZ1097538.

Happy documenting!

I was recently asked to help one of our elderly neighbours get access to Skype via iPad to keep in touch with a very spread out family.

Unfortunately, for the time being our ADSL2+ bandwidth is very constrained with about 5Mbit down and 1Mbit up. Naturally you can see how an existing network of consumers might make sharing this link difficult.

Enter my recent WRT54GL replacement, the Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite. I am the first to admit that the CLI at first was very off putting coming from the familiar environment of OpenWRT. However, the lower power consumption, price point and possibility of getting high speed inter-vlan routing made it an attractive choice.

The network

+-----------------+         XXXX  Wireless                             
| Guest Client    |                                                    
| 10.0.150.xxx/24 |         +--+  Wired                                
|                 |                                                    
+-----------------+                                                    
        X                                                              
        X                                EdgeRouter Lite               
        X                 +-------------------------------------------+
        X                 |                                           |
+-------------+---+       | +---------------+       +---------------+ |
| Asus WL500GP-V2 |       | | Guest Network |       | PPPOE Bridge  | |
| L2 Bridge       +---------+ 10.0.150.1/24 |       | 10.0.109.1/29 | |
| OpenWRT         |       | | bond0.150     |       | eth1          | |
+-----------------+       | +---------------+       +---------------+ |
                          |                                           |
                          +-------------------------------------------+

The network diagram does not show the other networks the ERL is managing but you get the picture. Since I am ultimately greedy, I have NOT configured any shaping on the other networks. The goal with this exercise is to ensure that the neighbors cant give me any surprises by hammering the available bandwidth.

We set out with the goal of:

• Downstream speeds shaped to 1Mbit
• Upstream speeds shaped to 256Kbit
• Guests must use a different external IP for NAT
• No transfer limits or other restrictions (Only a WPA2 PSK)

The configuration

First we need to establish our traffic policies.

# show traffic-policy
 rate-control guestnet-ratecontrol {
     bandwidth 1mbit
     burst 15k
     latency 50ms
 }
 rate-control guestnet-out-ratecontrol {
     bandwidth 256kbit
     burst 15k
     latency 50ms
 }

Next, we need to implement a workaround to apply traffic policy to an outbound interface. We achieve this using the IFB interfaces to redirect our traffic a second time (At these speeds I have not seen a particular overhead for this double handling of traffic).

# show interfaces input ifb2
 traffic-policy {
     out guestnet-out-ratecontrol
 }

Finally, we assign the inbound policy to the guest interface and apply our traffic redirection.

# show interfaces bonding bond0 vif 150
 address 10.0.150.1/24
 description OPENWRT
 firewall {
     in {
         name OPENWRT_IN
     }
     local {
         name OPENWRT_LOCAL
     }
 }
 redirect ifb2
 traffic-policy {
     out guestnet-ratecontrol
 }

There is vastly more detail available on the Ubiquiti wiki if your heading down the QOS or rate limiting paths. For me, the above works like a charm!

• Quality of Service
• Traffic Policies

Results

The outcome as measured by Speedtest.net is right on the spot.

Unrestricted

Guest

Ahoy!

It appears you have found a new blog. You can learn more about me here. My plan for this website is to share my activity, notes and contributions with the opensource community that has supported me so much in the beginings on my career.

Additionally, this is my first real foray into static sites (thanks GitHub Pages). Please feel free to leave a comment or alternatively if your not a fan of Disqus and/or Google Analytics feel free to use NoScript or similarly draconian browser configuration.