Networking

So, this has been a blog post in the making for a while now but never got around to fully writing it up, so here goes nothing…

I run a UDM Pro in the house. It has 2 WAN Links: 1 1Gb link and 1 10Gb Link. I also run AS204994, my own ASN with its own Transit and Peering connections, mostly in Europe. There is a VM in the house which acts as a connection to AS204994, which gives me a full connection to the Internet through my own ASN. More details on my AS204994 blog are here.

I use ZeroTier on my network for a good few things, including internal network peering between BGP VMs, management of machines, and now, connecting to my car over LTE. This is one of those posts that sounds silly, but is very handy! First, the parts list:

• Car.
• 3G/4G/5G modem of some sort. I am using a Huawei Wingle. Can be used without the Router below, but I wanted Zerotier, so I have it in modem only mode.
• A router that supports Zerotier. I am using a modified TP-Link TL-WR703N upgraded to 16MB ROM and 64MB RAM. This is required for newer OpenWRT builds
• a dashcam that connects over Wifi. I am using a BlackVue DR750S-2CH
• Latest ROOter software from Of Modems and Men
• Patients.

After installing the the latest copy of ROOter on the TPLink (or router of your choice) and getting the modem configured correctly (this took a while) you need to install the Zerotier software though the dashboard. Once installed, I joined my Zerotier network using the CLI (SSH into the router) and the approved it though the my.zerotier.com dashboard. Once its approved and connected, you can now go to the Zerotier IP and get to the router directly. From here, you can either setup a route in Zerotier to point at the internal network behind the router, or, in my case, setup a  SSH tunnel to the dashcam. I found the IP given to the dashcam and used SSH forwarding to get to it. Finally, i used the URLs from Digital-Nebula’s hackview repo to get to the different URLs. I use this to download stuff like GPS logs, emergency videos, etc. I have to clean up some scripts at some stage for this, and plan to upload them at some stage.

With the whole Work From Home thing probably becoming more and more normal in the years to come (I can count on 2 hands how many times I have physically been in my main office in the last 7 months) there are a couple of certainties in that people will come up against. One is passwords expiring and needing to be changed, one is password resets being required and finally laptops or desktops needing to be domain joined or connected to the domain before they can be fully provisioned. As the (currently only) IT guy in our office, I have had to deal with these first hand, and decide to write this post, helping both my fellow employees, and possibly other IT Admins stuck in this challenge.

So, this post has been a long time coming! A load of different things to talk about, so lets get started!

GodBox V3

So, for a long time, I have been thinking about GodBoxV3, the replacement to GodBoxV2. And when planning this, i had some ideas of what it should be:

• Minimum of 2×16 cores (double godboxv2)
• About the same RAM, if not more
• FAST STORAGE!
• Is able to run my twin 30" 4K monitors
• Would like 10Gb/s NICs

Well, It finally happened! I got the machine, built it and, well, its impressive! How did i do with specs? Well…

A few months back, Three Ireland came out with an LTE broadband offer: Unlimited* LTE broadband for EUR30 per month. It did come with a 18 month contract, but I pulled the trigger and got it as a backup link. I picked this up in the local Three store, and they had a couple of options for modems: a couple of Huawei mobile Wifi hotspots (E5573 or E5577) or a Huawei B525 Modem, which is designed for home use. Alternatively, there was a Sim only option, but given the modem was free with the contact, i went with the B525.

So, if you are reading this page, it is being delivered with the magic of Anycast. Well, technically, it was before, since i used Cloudflare, and it still is because of Cloudflare, but also because of my own ASN (As204994), some servers in different locations, and some magic, which i will explain a bit of in this post.

This all started late last year when i got my hands on an ASN and a /48 block of IPv6 addresses. I had been reading stuff about BGP, routing, etc, and decided to go all in. it was quite cheap with the help of HostUS. All in, it was about $50 for the year. As part of the process, i needed 2 upstream providers to say they would accept my announcement. They were Hurricane Electric though their Tunnel Broker service, and Vultr using a few of their VPSs.

in a previous post, I talked about setting up a distributed S3 like data storage system using Minio and ZeroTier. Well, this week, the ZeroTier guys tweeted about this.

A few people then started asking questions, and looking for a follow up, so here it is.

First, a quick recap. I had 4 machines, all running Linux. Three of them were in 1 time zone (GMT+1) and one was in another (GMT). Looking at the Distributed Minio Quickstart Guide again, there is a mention of times being in sync. which is probably why this did not work as planned. and by “not work as planed”, I mean that Minio would crash, or not be responsive, or not write data in the place it should have. which was a pain. But looking at the documentation again, they do mention that Windows support is “experimental” which means, hopefully, some day it will be not so experimental, and might work. Given that most of my machines in house are Windows boxes, this would be a nice feature.

So, something i have been looking into in recient times has been Distributed Storage, and, more specifically, how to use the storage in my many, many machines to protect data, and also increese my usable space… There are a few projects on the market that do this (Ceph, NooBaa and Gluster all spring to mind) but some are more painful to setup than others… which brings me nicely to Minio. Minio is a 20ish MB executable you download from their site, mark it as executable (on Linux or Mac Boxes) and run… and you have yourself a S3 compatable storage server… Simples!

I have talked about the theory of the “Cloud desktop” twice on my older blog (Rackspace’s Hosted Virtual Desktop and More on the desktop in the cloud) way back since 2011. Since then, a few things have changed:

• Amazon have released AWS Workspaces, which is a cloud based desktop using Teradici’s PCoIP technology
• Both EC2 and Azure now have GPU enabled VMs to spin up and use
• NVidia have released NVidia Grid cards, specifically for the “cloud” or “remote” desktop services.
• Windows Continuum now allows you to use your Windows Phone with a keyboard, monitor and mouse, allowing you to replace your desktop. basically, plug your continuum enabled phone into a docking station, and use it as a Windows Desktop. Email, Browsing, Office Apps, etc. anything that supports UWP.
• and now VMWare has just released a Windows UWP app that works with Continuum

With all the increased bandwidth for mobile devices (4 and 5G, expanding wifi, etc) the idea of having your desktop live in the cloud is getting nearer… interesting times, my friend… interesting times…

[NOTE] This part 9 in a series of posts. The rest can be found here

Well, the double internet experiment is about ready to be finished. After 9 posts, 4 months, lots of sweating, many painful nights trying to figure out why something stopped using, shouting when Netflix did not work, wondering why my internet connection was so slow, and many, many other problems, i have decided to wind down the project. in the last 9 posts, i have learned a lot, and i hope i have helped someone figure out some stuff on their end. Even though this is a wind up of the project, there are still new things i have to share.