Networking on the bin

Amazon VPC Basics

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

For the past five weeks we have been getting deep in our Scalable Solutions series. At Entasis we work with our customers to help them build solutions that are Scalable in design, Resilient by nature, with Performance on demand. We feel that these three components are the pillars that all truly scalable solutions are built with. Here is what we have gone over thus far:

Week 1 – Amazon Route 53 Basics

Solaris 11: Configure IP Over Infiniband Devices

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this article we will be going over the configuration of an infiniband interface with the IPoIB protocol on Solaris 11, specifically Solaris 11.2 (previous versions of Solaris 11 should work the same, however there have been changes in the ipadm and dladm commands).

Identify Infiniband Datalinks

First we need to identify the underlying interfaces of the infiniband interfaces. In my case net2 and net3.

 bash
 
 
dladm show-phys
LINK MEDIA STATE SPEED DUPLEX DEVICE
net1 Ethernet unknown 0 unknown ixgbe1
net0 Ethernet up 1000 full ixgbe0
net2 Infiniband up 32000 unknown ibp0
net3 Infiniband up 32000 unknown ibp1
net5 Ethernet up 1000 full vsw0

Another way to confirm the infiniband interfaces is to use the show-ib command.

Linux KVM: Bridging a Bond on CentOS 6.5

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today we are going to hop back into the KVM fray, and take a look at using CentOS as a hypervisor., and configuring very resilient network connections to support our guests. Of course these instructions should be valid on Red Hat Linux and Oracle Linux as well, though there is a little more to be done around getting access to the repos on those distributions…

Enable Bonding

I am assuming this is a first build for you, so this step might not be applicable, but it won’t hurt anything.

Solaris Networking: Datalink Multipathing Protocol

Mon, 19 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this article we are going to go over Datalink Multipathing Protocol (DLMP) available in Solaris. DLMP is similar to IPMP, however there are some key differences, the biggest being the layer at which it operates. DLMP operates at the datalink layer of the OSI model, while IPMP operates at the network layer. Due to the differences in those layers DLMP opens up a lot of possibilities that were not possible with IPMP. For example if you had a requirement for redundant networking for a service, either IPMP and DLMP would both be able to meet that requirement very well. However if you had a requirement that the service runs inside of a zone or a logical domain then the level of work in IPMP becomes much higher. This is because these hypervisors assign datalink devices to their guests. Since the redundancy for IPMP is built on a level higher we need to assign multiple non-redundant interfaces to the guests and then build the interfaces and IPMP groups inside each of the guests.

Solaris Networking: IP Multipathing Protocol

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In this article we are going to go over some basics of using IPMP in Solaris. We will discuss this on the latest versions of Solaris 10 and 11 on the SPARC platform, these instructions should also work on the x86 platform, but will be dependent on the listed version numbers, as the networking stack has changed alot of the past few minor versions of Solaris 10 and 11.

Solaris 11.1

Create an IPMP Group

Powerconnect: Configure Link Aggregation Groups

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we will be configuring LACP to interconnect some switch stacks as part of a network upgrade. Please keep in mind that part of configuring the LAG will result in the ports losing connectivity, so while it is not necessary to use a console cable, please keep in mind how you are connecting to the switch and if you will interrupt that connection by any of your actions, and plan accordingly.

Dell Powerconnect 6200: Enable SSH and Disable Telnet

Mon, 08 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Most modern switches include the ability to use SSH as a remote communications protocol. Here we will enable that functionality and disable telnet on the Dell Powerconnect 6248 switches.

Enable SSH

In order to enable SSH we need to generate the keys which will be used by SSH to encrypt the traffic.

 text
 
 
console>enable
console# configure
(config)# crypto key generate rsa
(config)# crypto key generate dsa
(config)# ip ssh server
(config)# exit
console# copy running-config startup-config

Disable Telnet

Depending on your config you might not need to disable this, but if it is enabled you should disable it.

Linux KVM: Ubuntu 12.10 with Openvswitch

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today I am revisiting my previous post on Openvswitch on Ubuntu 12.04. Things have changed since then. Previously Openvswitch was relatively new and as such the userland tools (with libvirt being the one I use) didn’t support it yet, so while you could have used Openvswitch by executing the kvm processes for each VM manually. Since this was a predictable problem the Openvswitch guys created a brcompat module, which would take the place of the bridge_utils functionality and expose Openvswitch bridges as legacy bridges. This allowed the existing userland which already had the legacy bridge functionality builtin to continue to operate the same way. Anyways as of libvirt 0.9.11 the native Openvswitch functionality is present and supported. As such I am updating my documentation to include this alternate and preferred method of operation.

Solaris 11: DNS Client Configuration Using Svccfg

Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In Solaris 11, alot of configurations are being moved from configuration files into the Service Management Framework. Here we will discuss this change around the DNS client.

View Existing DNS Client Configuration

 bash
 
 
svccfg -s network/dns/client listprop config
config application
config/value_authorization astring solaris.smf.value.name-service.dns.client
config/domain astring test.local
config/nameserver net_address 10.0.0.152

Update Existing DNS Client Configuration

Here we will update our name servers. In this case we are replacing the original with two different addresses.

Solaris 11: Change Hostname Using Svccfg

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When Solaris 11 was released more configurations were moved into the service management framework, and moved out of configuration files, one of these changes was the hostname/nodename.

View Hostname in SMF

This will read back the configuration out of the SMF.

 bash
 
 
svccfg -s system/identity:node listprop config
config application
config/nodename astring solaris11box
config/loopback astring solaris11box

Change Hostname in SMF

We have two separate settings, which need to be updated.

Linux-KVM: Ubuntu 12.04 with Openvswitch

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: October 29, 2012

This article doesn’t work on Ubuntu 12.10, to use Ubuntu 12.10 please refer to my new article here.

Openvswitch is a better way of managing your virtual networking stacks for KVM and Xen. This can be used instead of the bridge-utils package, and has the ability to use VLANs, LACP, QoS, sFlow, and others. In this article we will be using Ubuntu 12.04 (beta1) to configure Openvswitch to hand out networking interfaces to KVM guests.

Adventures in ZFS: Configuring iSCSI Targets

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The most critical thing about any storage implementation is flexibility. This means that you need to be able to adapt your solution to changing environmental considerations. The nice thing about a ZFS-based solution is that all of the building blocks are available. If you want to use it as a NAS device, you can use CIFS, NFS. If you want to provision Fibre Channel that is available too. Even some of the more sought after SAN features are included, replication, deduplication, thin-provisioning, and many more. Now in todays article we are going to discuss how you can go about setting up iSCSI targets. I personally am not a fan of iSCSI (I have been bitten by the hard knee too many times), however you really can’t argue with the flexibility that is provided by being able to quickly provision storage on already existing or readily available hardware. The best thing about this process is that it is really similar to provisioning fibre channel targets, so if you are familiar with this process (available here) then you will be able to quickly adapt to the iSCSI variation.

Solaris 11: Network Configuration Advanced

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post we went over the basics of configuring a network interface in Solaris 11, without using the Network Auto Magic (NWAM) which is enabled by default. In this article we will go over some of the more advanced features which can be leveraged including VLANs, aggregation groups, and jumbo frames.

Configure VLAN Tagging

Create a VLAN, specify the VLAN id with the “-v”, then specify the interface with the “-l”, and finally create a name for the tagged interface (in this case user0 since this particular system is the user VLAN, if you have more descriptive names of your VLANs you can use them here).

Solaris 11: Network Configuration Basics

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I have been doing research for my next big series “So You Want to Learn ZFS.” This series is basically going to be a multi-part series of How-To’s which hopefully will give you the ability to build a file server (or even a SAN) based on ZFS if you so choose. However there are a few things that I failed to take into account.

Solaris 11 is so different from Solaris 10.
Solaris 11 is so different from EVERYTHING else.

I figured that I’d be able to kind of gloss over the high points of how to get your system up and running and just dive right into the fun ZFS stuff. So before we get into the good stuff there are some basics that we will need to go over first. Today we will cover basic networking.