Linux

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.

VyOS is quite interesting OS. It’s a open source Linux based network operating system based on Vyatta. It’s config style seems bit like JunOS in terms of hierarchy and set/edit/delete options while editing configuration.  

**Can one use it in a small ISP or a Corporate LAN setup? 

Someone asked me recently if we can have complete open source based router in smaller network doing basic stuff. Not with not-so-streamlined Linux shell but networking OS where network engineers favorite tool “?” works in CLI with options. Let’s take a possible case with bunch of routers, a server with speedtest-mini running on it and end desktop with Ubuntu-desktop on it along with VyOS based router. Goal here is to have basic features to work (to start with!). I am conducting this test and setup on the VM infrastructure at home but that should have zero impact/configuration of network devices and hence not going to focus on that part. All devices including server, desktop and router are pretty much running on virtual machines or KVM containers.     To configure and test:

One of things which people often asked me around in past was on how to have multiple IPs on Linux machine under various circumstances. I know there are ton of blog posts about this but very few explain how it works and possible options under different use cases etc.   I will share router side and server side config with focus on how it should be done from server end. Assuming server side config to be for Ubuntu/Debian. You can find similar concept for CentOS.   Say you have a router on IP 10.10.10.1 and server on IP 10.10.10.2 on a /24 (255.255.255.0) subnet. Assming that entire 10.10.10.0/24 is available for server’s connectivity. Setup would be like: Configuration so far is super simple. You have got 10.10.10.1 placed on R1’s interface (g1/0) which connects to server01 and server01 has 10.10.10.2.

Some important life changes…

I am not with Cloudaccess.net anymore. It was very nice experience of setting up AS54456 from scratch along with design of anycasting DNS instances.  Wishing Cloudaccess.net good luck for time ahead.

I just started working with Packet Clearing House (PCH). Looking forward towards exciting time ahead! Interesting pages to checkout - Anycasting DNS for TLDs  & Peering information. 

Thanks for reading.

And Ubuntu 11.04 released yesterday.

I will do a seperate blog post reviewing Ubuntu 11.04 specially the new Unity interface, but for now I am trying to help Linux community by additonal mirror.

Incase you are going to download Ubuntu - I would encourage you to use this mirror for Asian and European region.

http://server7.anuragbhatia.com/Ubuntu/11.04/release/

Update: Mirror has been removed as of now. author: “Anurag Bhatia” url: “/2011/04/web-hosting/ubuntu-11-04-additional-mirror/”

Keep spreading the Linux! :)