networking

Distributed latency monitoring

Anurag Bhatia
For a while, I have been looking for a smokeping alternative for latency monitoring from different servers spread around. While smokeping has survived well over time, in 2023 it feels like an outdated package, with limited options, lacks federation etc. This post from Karan Sharma / Zerodha on “Monitoring my home network” was exciting. His setup included a telegraph agent on a local server, Prometheus to scrap data and Grafana to draw latency data.

SSH key automation at automation workshop!

Anurag Bhatia
Next month is SANOG 39 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. SANOG is a South Asian Network Operator Group event and a good place for meeting a number of ISPs, telecom players, Ops team members of content networks, internet exchanges etc. Besides attending the conference, I will be doing a workshop on Network Automation. It will be a four-day workshop covering Containers, Ansible, Gitlab CI/CD pipeline and REST APIs for automation in the workflow.

Welcome to India Vultr!

Anurag Bhatia
Vultr has announced start of their Mumbai location on 12th of this month. It’s amazing to see them entering India. Always a good thing for growth of cloud computing on demand in India. Besides Vultr, we have got Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, Linode, Oracle Cloud etc in India. I heard OVH also planning for Indian location and so have to see how that goes. In meanwhile, let’s have a quick check on Vultr’s network connectivity.

Redundancy on the servers without BGP

Anurag Bhatia
A developer friend recently asked me about the design of redundancy on servers. He had a valid point - running BGP can be tricky and expensive since most colo & datacenter host would offer simple static routing & usually with just a couple of IP addresses. Furthermore, due to IPv4 exhaustion, the prices of /24 have shot off pretty massively. On top of this burning, a /24 on single or multiple servers is also a questionable design practice unless one of hosting & selling hundreds of virtual machines on those servers.

Designing high capacity home network

Anurag Bhatia
For the last few months, we have been working on setting up a dedicated room for my home office usage. This gives me the opportunity to plan for changes in the home network. Key design ideas Cabling should support needs for now as well as the future but active hardware stays strictly for what I need for now. Hardware can be upgraded easily. It is not impossible to change cabling in the future since we have ducts - 0.