Networking

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. ...

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. ...

Sometimes cloud providers or maybe in your own infrastructure you might find the need to have your default gateway outside of your subnet, for example this is sometimes done by Hetzner and Myloc. The problem with cloud-init is that it doesn’t like it when your gateway is outside your subnet, well, it works with for example 1.1.1.100/32 and 1.1.1.1 but when you try 1.1.1.100/32 and 9.9.9.9 as gateway you will find out that cloud-init happily provisions your VM with the address, but that there are no routes. ...