Friday Feedback

Networking

This week has had a few successes. I was able to upgrade one node to 10 Gbit/second and to hand it some more disk. Everything seems to be working. More upgrades are slowly happening.

Physical, OpenVSwitch, OVN, Oh My.

Physical networking has many different levels. The easiest, which most people deal with, is Level2 or L2. At L2, you plug cables in, and it just works. It really is that simple.

There are some exceptions, the L2 switch might not support the speed that you want, or you might need power on that port, but by and large, it is simple.

Level 3 devices start to get a bit more complicated. Cisco has made an entire business model out of making Level 3 devices.

The difference is that a L3 device provides routing. Modern L3 devices also provide services, such as DHCP or SNMP. It also should have some routing protocols implemented, but this is not required. There are so many features that it gets complicated fast.

OpenVSwitch was designed to provide both virtual and physical packet switching. Instead of using cables, it uses programming, called logical flows. The cool thing is that these logical flows can be pushed down into the network interface to run below the kernel.

OVN or Open Virtual Network is layered on top of OpenVSwitch, but does not require OpenVSwitch. As long as all you are doing is building and looking at switch and router configurations, there is no requirement to actually interact with OpenVSwitch

OVN has a “north” and a “south” side. On the north side, you define logical devices and how those devices are interconnected. A process is tasked to convert those logical devices and interconnections into datapaths and logical flows on the south side.

Another process then converts those datapaths and logical flows into open flow. These are what do the real work.

Now the fun part. All of these pieces need to talk to each other and all the communications paths are configured.

I have something working. Maybe it is right? It is closer to right than I expected.

But how do we get there from here?

Which takes us into the world of routing. I’m learning about OSPF. Which caused me to have to relearn about multicasting. Which isn’t working for me yet.

Regardless, my network knowledge is better and getting better.

Monitoring

I wondered through one of the node areas yesterday and noticed that one of the KVM’s had been left active on a node. Normally, I want them turned off so I don’t get screen burn in.

On the screen were some disk errors. This is a not good thing. These leads to going back to the monitoring game.

I’ve been studiously ignoring Prometheus for years now. I took the plunge, and it isn’t as bad as I first thought it was. Now to figure out how to use Grafana. It is powerful, but I don’t have the insight I need to know how to do things. That’s next week’s learning task.

Piles of Garbage

If the left didn’t have double standards, they would have no standards at all.

The latest example of this is that a comedian, who’s routine is to insult people, made a joke about Puerto Rico. It didn’t go over well with the audience. Part of that is a lack of context.

It appears that a few years ago a hurricane went through and blew tons and tons of garbage into the sea. Since that time, it has been washing up on the shores. The people have to clean up the beaches constantly, leading them to have a running joke about living on an island of garbage. Note: This is a second hand story.

That’s not important. What is important is that the left seized on this to claim that every person associated with Trump, like you and me, is racist and hates Puerto Ricans.

Never mind the name-calling that comes out of their people, every single day. They have attempted to label us with every vile label they can come up with. Nazi comes to mind.

The hit pieces had just come up to speed when Joe stepped into it with both clown sized feet. He was recorded as calling Trump supporters “garbage”.

Yeah, that really happened.

The short videos have been laugh-out-loud funny. In addition, people have taken to wearing garbage bags to vote. It can’t be a political statement because the media and the White House are claiming that Joe didn’t say what he is on video saying.

In an epic troll, Trump arrived at his rally in a white garbage truck with “Trump” on the side. He wore an orange hi-vis vest into the rally and proceeded to poke fun at himself.

Tuesday is your last day to Vote!

Go VOTE!

The Trumpet Calls of Battle

The left is prepared to do violence if Trump wins. The Right is in FAFO mode. The magazines have been topped off. The firearms cleaned and put away.

It could get spicy out there, people. Keep your head on a swivel.

Have you spotted anything hinky?

People acting like poll workers that aren’t? Cops obeying pseudo poll workers? People being told to leave the lines to vote?

Hundreds of reports of that sort of thing happening in PA.