The thoughts and projects of an engineer who likes to convert solder, firmware, and wire into all sorts of different forms of entertainment.
As part of a broader project, I’ve been working on setting up the infrastructure to be able to power on new servers, have them boot over the network to download and run the complete Linux installation process, and then reboot into the freshly provisioned operating system with zero human interaction. This ability to fully reinstall the entire OS on any new (or replaced) hardware is a big win for…
We’re coming up on three years now that [John, Warthog9] and I have been running the MicroMirror project, and I decided that it was about time to start working on the next generation of the MicroMirror appliance hardware design. Currently, our main appliance consists of an HP T620 thin client with a 2TB M.2 SATA SSD in it, but due to a lot of feedback from networks that they didn’t have any way to…
Fastestmirror is a configuration option for the yum and dnf package managers in the RPM ecosystem (i.e. Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, AlmaLinux, etc) that everyone loves to hate. The name of the option is so alluring; who wouldn’t want to use the fastest mirror when downloading software packages? Enabling fastestmirror is a staple of every “First ten things to do after installing Fedora” article from…
I’ve been writing on this blog for something like 18 years now, which is just wild. When I originally fired up this blog as a way to improve my technical writing out of High School, I picked Blogger since they had already been aquired by Google at that point, so it was certain that Blogger would continue to be a thing into the foreseeable future. Fastforward to 2024, and Blogger being a Google…
As should surprise no one, based on my past projects of running my own autonomous system , building my own Internet Exchange Point , and building a global anycast DNS service , I kind of enjoy building Internet infrastructure to make other people’s experience online better. So that happened again, and like usual, this project got well out of hand. Linux updates You run apt update or dnf upgrade…
Like many switch vendors, Arista switches running EOS only accept Arista branded optics by default. They accept any brand of passive direct attach copper cables, but since third party optics tend to cause a prohibitive number of support cases, it’s needed to force the user to make a deliberate decision to enable third party optics so they can appreciate that they’re venturing out into unsupported…
Regular readers will remember how one of my friends offered to hold my beer while I went and started my own autonomous system , and then the two of us and some of our friends thought it would be funny to start an Internet Exchange , and that joke got wildly out of hand … Well, my lovely friend Javier has done it again. About 18 months ago, Javier and I were hanging out having dinner, and he idly…
I’ve written another blog post for the Arista EOS blog. This time, it’s on how to use the brand new feature in EOS where it now supports RPKI via RTR. I walk through a simple example of how to enable Docker in EOS and spin up a Routinator instance on the switches’ loopback interface to use RPKI to validate prefixes from BGP peers.
I’ve written another blog post for the Arista corporate blog! This time, it’s on the basics of how to turn on the Quality of Service feature in EOS and start picking out various classes of traffic to treat them better/worse than normal.
A couple years ago, one of my friends gave me a big pile of little Dell FX160 thin clients, which are cute little computers which have low power Atom 230 processors in them with the ability to support 3GB of RAM. Being thin clients means they were originally meant to be diskless nodes that could boot a remote desktop application to essentially act as remote graphical consoles to applications…