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I converted this site from Wordpress to Hugo with wp2hugo to get me started. Reason behind this is that I really liked writing the blog in Markdown when I wrote a post for AlmaLinux, besides that it also gives a great showcase for your abilities in working with Git and code on its own. One of my goals was to maintain my search engine rankings by keeping the old pages at the same location, which it handled nicely. ...

This year was a busy year with bigger long running projects, which take quite a toll but are in the end very rewarding. In a small list the following activities are the most notable: Migrated a Nagios Core monitored environment to a Zabbix environment, based on the Zabbix agent 2 and Active checks; Previously we built the Nagios config files with Python from our CMDB, in Zabbix we use Autoregistration rules based on metadata. Consolidated 3 datacenters, consisting of 10 racks into 2 datacenters with 8 racks, doing so decommisioning older servers and rebuilding the entire network infrastructure, transistioning from traditional copper to fully fiber, standardized on Singlemode, fully multihomed, built with Juniper Apstra; Upgraded two PowerDNS nameservers to up-to-date versions; Upgraded multiple Proxmox clusters from 6.x to 8.x; Upgraded multiple Ceph clusters from Nautilus to Reef; Deployed and implemented multiple MariaDB Galera clusters; Migrated servers from one Fortigate VDOM to another with minimal impact; Expanded Ceph clusters and replaced nodes with live workloads; Cleaned up two RIPE ORGS and handled the audit of one; Built a campus network based on Fortiswitches managed by Fortigates. Worked together with Juniper on a Case Study about Juniper Apstra; Handled multiple CentOS 6 to AlmaLinux upgrades; Upgraded Zabbix 6.4 to 7.0 LTS; Gave multiple presentations and trainings about networking and Proxmox; Attended AlmaLinux Day, CloudFest, Juniper NL Tech club, Dutch Proxmox day, NLNOG Day 2024 and Cephalocon which sparked my interest and got me more involved in opensource communities and trying to bring my relevant input;

Last week I gave a presentation about technical adoption, to paraphrase it differently, how do you get your peers or coworkers to adopt a solution that you designed and get them to be interested and maybe even more important, to work with it. This is a problem that a lot of techs will face once in a while, as even when you propose the best technical solution, the people might pick a different one, bypassing all your efforts that went into it. ...

Migrating from CentOS 7 can be a daunting task for businesses. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how ELevate helped us future-proof our systems by streamlining the migration process. When benny Vasquez asked if I’d want to write a blog about our usage of ELevate, I started almost immediately and gladly took the opportunity! Within Bizway BV we’re almost wrapping up our Journey of updating all our and customer CentOS based systems, in which ELevate helped us out tremendously to future-proof our systems. ...

Something very easily overlooked is what my homelab looks like, as it mostly just works! It is a well thought out combination of fit for purpose hardware, without becoming “work”, so while I do have a preference for specific hardware, I still have the freedom to build it differently than I would do at my day job. It consists of the following parts: Netgate SG-4860-1U as a pfSense firewall and router; 2x Juniper Networks EX2300-C-12P for switching, running as a VC (virtual chassis); 2x Unifi NanoHD as WiFi Accesspoints; A small server running Proxmox, built within a Fractal design node 304 case: Intel i7-8700k cpu; 64GB DDR4 Crucial memory; Asus Prime H310I-Plus motherboard; Google Coral m.2 TPU; Sonoff Zigbee dongle P as a Zigbee router for Home Assistant. Flexoptix optics for terminating my fiber internet. While I like to automate at scale, I tend to like to get hands on at times in which my homelab gives great opportunities to test and try out new things, but also run mission-critical services to support my personal needs. ...

Last December I was invited by Niels Raijer from Fusix Networks to join their Fusix Podcast, last year I’ve been working closely with Fusix as there were some big Networking projects on the roadmap, which is a really nice experience. Of course I gladly accepted the invite and couldn’t wait to make my first appearance in a podcast! It can be heard here: https://app.springcast.fm/18944/intent-based-networking-met-david-der-nederlanden We talked about replacing the whole network for a museum without any interruption and working with Juniper Apstra. ...

It’s becoming a tradition now I guess :-), another small list of projects I worked on the past year. Consolidated some PowerDNS based nameservers into one, to make administration easier; Migrated a Software VDOM link to NPU VDOM link with minimal downtime; Started working with RIPE; Enabled IPv6 in two Service provider networks; Built a Service provider network based on Juniper, EVPN/VXLAN with the super cool tool called Juniper Apstra; Built a huge Juniper Virtual chassis for a customer; Built a classic out-of-band network; Decommissioned a lot of legacy networks; Replaced live routers running in a virtual chassis with a VRRP set-up without downtime; Consolidated some pfSense firewalls into a Fortigate; Written lots of ansible plays and improved older ones; Enabled IPv6 SSL-VPN and Nameservers; Implemented a couple of HA MariaDB Galera clusters; Designed and built 8 new datacenter racks from scratch, while also switching from copper to fiber, keeping the cables neat; Worked with some great external partners; Paved the way for a good foundation to build a high available Zabbix 6.4 cluster.

In the landscape of hypervisors there are a couple of big names that always come up when engineers are talking about virtualisation, a couple can be, VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix, you name them. The reason for that is that they’ve been around for so long that most people have seen or touched it at some point in their career, in 2008 Proxmox came around, as a newcomer it was always the special kid in class that used it. ...

Today I struggled for some time to get a LANCOM vRouter appliance to work on Proxmox, in the end I got there but the provided instructions weren’t working. Hence I write this small post to help that small group of people out there that might at some point come across the need to do the same. According to the official installation guide for the KVM image we should use the following features: - Import the provided .img as a VirtIO Disk; - Provide some CPU and RAM; - Use Standard VGA as Display; - Provide two serial ports; - Provide as many VirtIO network cards as needed. ...

For some time the AI-based development has been going on now, and I’ve been watching closely how and what it changed as of today, by no means I am a AI expert however. At first I was a bit sceptical, while AI can definitely help in our day-to-day life, it can also quite quickly create short-sightedness in which it becomes just as smart as you are. Let me explain, you give a prompt to the AI, and the AI gives you an answer, which means that what stays in our own hands is writing the prompts and interpreting the answers for maybe writing further prompts. This means that describing our intent becomes more and more important, it is not only about who knows what line of code goes where best, it is turning into whether you’re able to describe your intent as detailed and clearly as possible. ...