HOME LAB NETWORK REDESIGN PART 2: THE EDGE ROUTERS
As I have never used a Mikrotik router before, there was quite a big learning curve. I’ve only really used Cisco/Juniper like interfaces to configure routers, and I’m a fan of them. Even though I have gotten a little more used to the RouterOS command line, I must say I’m not a huge fan of it. Most of the reasons are quite minor reasons, but some of the reasons I don’t really like it is: I find it silly how the menus are structured. For example, I have to first configure an interface in /interface context first, then switch context to /ip address to add an IP address.
Read moreHOME LAB NETWORK REDESIGN PART 1: THE REMOTE DEDICATED SERVER
As promised, here is a very very basic diagram of my home lab. This is quite a high level overview of it, and the layer 2 information is not present as I suck at Visio, and all the connectors were getting messy on Visio with the layer 2 stuff present! What is not shown in the digram: There are two back-to-back links between the edge routers which are in an active-passive bond. Each edge router has two links going into two switches (one link per switch), both these links are in an active-passive bonded interface. The two edge firewalls only have two links going to each of those switches.
Read moreHOME LAB NETWORK REDESIGN WITH MIKROTIK ROUTERS
I currently have two cable connections from Virgin Media coming into my house due to some annoying contract problems while moving. I originally had one line on the 60 Mb/s package, and the other on 100 Mb/s, but when Virgin Media upgraded me to 120 Mb/s I downgraded the 60 Mb/s line to 30 Mb/s to reduce costs. Since I got into this strange arrangement with Virgin Media, I have been using two separate routers for the connections. A Cisco 1841 Integrated Services Router on the 30 Mb/s line, and a Cisco 2821 Integrated Services Router on the 120 Mb/s line, but I found that I wasn’t able to max out the faster line using the Cisco 2821 ISR.
Read moreCONNECTING TO USENET VIA TWO INTERNET CONNECTIONS
I currently have two connections from Virgin Media at home and I wanted to use them both to grab content from usenet. My Usenet provider is Supernews, I’ve used them for a couple of months, and from what I understand they are actually just rebranded product of Giganews. Supernews only actually allow you to connect to their servers from one IP per account, so even if I had set up load balancing to split connections over both my connections, it would not have worked very well for usenet as I will be going out via two IP addresses, so for this reason I decided to take another route.
Read moreTWO MORE CISCO 7204 VXRS ADDED TO MY HOME LAB!
Last week, I was browsing eBay (as you do!), and noticed two Cisco 7204 VXR routers auctions which were about to end pretty soon and the starting bid was £0.99, and there were no current bids! I’ve wanted to play with the bigger Cisco routers for a while. I have played with the Cisco ISRs, which are designed more for branch/smaller offices. I already have one 7204 VXR in my rack, but adding two more couldn’t hurt, so I figured I would go ahead and try my luck and bid. To my surprise, I won both! I managed to win one of them for £20, and the other for £0.
Read moreCISCO ASA 5505 RAM UPGRADE
Info 3rd June 2014 - If you are reading this post, you should check out my follow up post: Cisco ASA 9.2 on Cisco ASA 5505 with Unsupported Memory Configuration Fail I have two Cisco ASA 5505s in my home lab which I acquired almost two years ago from eBay. I was pretty lucky, as I paid under £70 for each because the seller wasn’t too sure what they were! Looking on eBay now, they are selling for around £120! 🙂 Pretty much straight away, I wanted to upgrade to the ASA 8.3 code, which required a RAM upgrade, so I upgraded it.
Read moreNGINX, VARNISH, HAPROXY, AND THIN/LIGHTTPD
Over the last few days, I have been playing with Ruby on Rails again and came across Thin, a small, yet stable web server which will serve applications written in Ruby. This is a small tutorial on how to get Nginx, Varnish, HAProxy working together with Thin (for dynamic pages) and Lighttpd (for static pages). I decided to take this route as from reading in many places I found that separating static and dynamic content improves performance significantly. Nginx Nginx is a lightweight, high performance web server and reverse proxy. It can also be used as an email proxy, although this is not an area I have explored.
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