100daysofhomelab

Day 123 of #100daysofhomelab and i think I finally sorted out Bird 2.0!

• It looks like Bird 2.0 is up and running, announcing stuff correctly, and the like. More testing required, but happy days!
• I also started announcing my new V4 and V6 space though VMHaus, using Bird 2.0. Now to do the same with Vultr and my DEC-IX box. [Update] Spoke too soon, seems my new space is not being announced upstream with VMHaus yet… Ticket opened to figure it out…
• Have been having issues with DNS for the last few days. I think its Active Directory Related. My PiHole is set to use the AD boxes as their next hop, then AD is using NextDNS as its upstream… I updated PiHole to now use the AD DNS only for internal DNS queries and things are starting to get a bit faster… Maybe my AD boxes are under powered, cause I have run Windows DNS for a long time before and never had issues with perf for DNS… Weird…

More re-numbering for tomorrow and hopefully upgrading the Vultr box to Bird 2.0. The one in DEC-IX will be a larger move… More peering connections to fix… We will see how things go!

Day 121 of #100daysofhomelab:

• Playing with Cloudflare Zero Trust SSH. Managed to get the web based SSH client working, along with the short lived certificates bit.
• Seem to be having issues with my Virgin Media Business Cable Modem… seems to fall over every now and again, causing Wireguard to loose the connection… Failed over to my Blacknight Business FTTH link which is more stable…
• more tweaks to the twitter card stuff on the site too.
• this weekend i need to finish my IPv4/IPv6 renumbering and start announcing my new space on AS204994. I will have some posts around that soon enough.

Day 120 of #100daysofhomelab and I nearly got Bird 2.0 working… Then it failed…

I am not 100% sure what I am doing wrong here, but essentially, on old Bird 1.6, you could create static routes like:

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    protocol static {
        #send traffic to own server external IPs direct to gateway peer.
        route x.x.x.x/32 via y.y.y.y;
    }

This would then have a static route set for that /32 going though that IP. The reason is because i would have something like as follows:

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    protocol kernel {
        scan time 90;
        import all;
        merge paths on; #ECMP
        export filter {
                if (source = RTS_STATIC || source = RTS_DEVICE) then accept; #static and device routes
                if (source = RTS_BGP) then {
                        # Export some routes to the kernel routing table

                        if (bgp_path.len = 0) then
                        {
                                accept; # Internal Routes
                        }

                        else

                        {
                                krt_prefsrc = OWNSRC;
                                accept;
                        }
                        reject;
                }

                accept;
        };   # Actually insert routes into the kernel routing table
    }

Problem is, that doesn’t seem to work on Bird 2… or I have screwed up something somewhere… More digging required…

Day 119 of #100daysofhomelab and there has been some big (and small) changes on the network.

• Moved my Mikrotik router from Hyper-V to Proxmox. Slightly lower spec CPU (Celeron J4125 vs Xeon Gold 6138) but has a direct connection to both the PPPoE link for the FTTH connection, along with the Cable Modem. So, less stuff in-between to go wrong.
• Fixed Prometheus to point at the new Mikrotik Exporter location. Had to tweak some IPs that were missing from the last move.
• Still in the process of IP Renumbering for my ASN move… Hope to get more time this week or this weekend to sort it out fully.

the real Day 116 (not like that fake 116 from yesterday…) of #100daysofhomelab and there are a few big changes going on.

• Big Job! Renumbering my homelab IPs. I have change providers for the leasing of my V4 and V6 space. In doing so, I have had to renumber with a different /24. Also, as part of this move, I get my hands on a /44 IPv6 Range. This gives me 16 full /48s that can be announced separately… How that is going to work, I’m not sure yet. This is going to take a few days!
• Above will also be done while upgrading to Bird 2.0, which is still ongoing.

Day 115 of #100daysofhomelab (Updated…), and this is the first real day in the since day 109… Been out of commission due to a cold and back issues… tonight’s post is brought to you by Jameson Whiskey, some honey and hot water…

Some updates:

• Zerotier 2.0 is back in Development which is sounding VERY COOL! Hopefully i will get to play with it soon!
• Managed to get my Bird 2.0 instance in VMHaus talking to my Mikrotik in house and Bird 1.6. More details due soon.
• Been reading some stuff about using Notion as a Headless CMS for blogging. Also found this post on how to do it with PipeDream, one of my favorite online tool!

Hopefully tomorrow i will be back in the land of the living, and will get some more updates done. Next task is to move the rest of my BGP boxes to Bird 2.0… Stay tuned!

Day 109 of #100daysofhomelab and I have done some tweaks to PipeDream, got some new switches and ordered a new HDMI monitor for my camera…

• Tweets from my miniblog (this one) get posted to twitter within 2 hours of posting, but they don’t include the #100daysofhomelab due to some issue with Hugo i haven’t figured out. They are posted using PipeDream. So, i tweaked Pipedream to now run a NodeJS script to fix the title to include #100daysofhomelab. The code is simple enough: string.replace(' 100daysofhomelab', ' #100daysofhomelab'). That space in front makes sure if i do ever fix hugo, i wont be putting 2 hashtags in…
• On a more homelab note, i got my hands of 2 EdgeSwitch 48 Pros. They are non POE, but have 2 10Gb uplinks. both will go in the Cloudshed with a fiber link between it and the house. More hopefully next week!
• I have ordered an Neewer F100 7 Inch Camera Monitor to attach to my Blackmagic Pocket 6k. Its meant to arrive on Monday, so hopefully that will be timing enough for a video on the Cloudshed!

Day 108 of #100daysofhomelab and, its a mix of news and updates.

• Been digging around dn42.eu and found their bird 2 config page. Hopefully that helps me get it working… update Yup! It worked! now to get the filters working…
• Cloudflare have a new outage center showing outage info from world wide. And there is a blog post explaining it
• They also upgraded Radar to 2.0.
• And since Alexa (not the echo one, but old Alexa) is dead, Radar now takes on that roll.

Day 107 of #100daysofhomelab and got some news and updates below:

• Still having issues with Bird 2 and Mikrotik… I seem to have gotten Mikrotik to announce its routes to Bird, but Bird not talking back… More shouting and cursing required…
• Cloudflare have announced Unmetered Rate limiting on their service. Originally, you needed to pay $5 per million requests. Now, you can have 1 rule for free plans, 2 for Pro and 5 for Business.
• They also have a deal with YubiKey where you can get YubiKeys though Cloudflare for as little at $10 per key!
• Still working on fixing all the issues with my main blog before i do a full move to Hugo. Its a bit of a pain cleaning up image links…

Day 106 of #100daysofhomelab and I am still trying to get my VMHaus Box running Bird 2.0. Its running, just not configured right. And some news updates too.

• managed to get Bird 2.0 and Mikrotik talking to each other, but the Mikrotik is announcing only V4 routes to Bird. No V6. And Bird is not announcing ANYTHING to mikrotik…
• upgraded all my Ubuntu and Debian boxes. Need to automate that with Ansible at some stage…
• Video series from Mikrotik about running Docker instances on Router OS.
  • First video shows how to setup containers on your routerboard.
  • Video 2 shows you how to get PiHole working on a routerboard.
• As part of Cloudflare’s Birthday week, they announced a few things of interest for me today. I have signed up for early access to both. We see what the story is
  • Introducing Cloudflare’s free Botnet Threat Feed for service providers
  • Monitor your own network with free network flow analytics from Cloudflare