awa

Our Next AG?

You have to wonder if Matt knew how much push back there would be? Regardless, he functioned as a fabulous stalking horse.

Network Nerding

So when is a cluster not a cluster nor a cluster f___, nor a f___ing cluster?

When you are talking about OVN/OVS.

OVN provides for a clustered database. This is what is used to control the OVS network mesh. The clustered database should exist on 3 or 5 different nodes.

The OVS network mesh is a collection of individual nodes, running a virtual switch, that are meshed via tunnels. This is not a cluster.

A network node requires OVS-switchd and a copy of the local OVSDB. That’s it.

If you want OVN over the top, you need to add ovn-controller to the node, which talks to the OVN database cluster and the OVSDB.

Once I got that through my dense head, this stuff started to make sense. I’m now to the point where I can bring up a 6 node system, 3 OVN controllers and 4 network nodes in just an hour or so. And it all just works. I’m busy finishing some documentation that I will publish.

50,000 Words

Ally has been going great guns on her next cookbook. November is national novel writing month.

The goal is to write a 50,000 word first draft or part of a first draft in the month of November. You can then edit, add to, or finish your novel over the coming months.

I’m proud of her. This will be the 5th year, I think I have that right, where she has made her 50,000+ words for the Month of November.

Lever Guns

I love my lever guns. Has anybody had hands on the new “modern” lever guns? By modern, I mean a lever gun firing a modern caliber out of a box magazine.

Introspection

This has been a long week of the left showing an enormous amount of introspection, looking at themselves to see why they lost the election…

Who am I kidding, the number who are actually looking at themselves appears to be so small compared to the complete melt down of why you are bad for voting for Trump.

Nerd Network Stuff

There are times when I feel so slow. I’ve been learning about OpenvSwitch and OVN. There are some great advantages to using it.

Unfortunately, nothing is ever easy.

I know how networks work. I’ve been in the trenches, bit fiddling on the wire, since the late 80s. This means I understand all these logical switches and logical routers that OVN uses.

Nope. I don’t.

The euphony that hit today? Open Virtual Networks use tables to describe logical devices. It translates those to code. That code is then “compiled” and handed to OpenvSwitch.

This is not “networking” this is “programming”. There are many things that “just work” in the networking world, which doesn’t translate to this programming perspective.

I’ve started reading the code, it is now starting to make more sense.

Fetterman

Or as he is better known, Lurch, has lurched to the right.

His race was seemingly pretty corrupt, and I knew he was going to be another Democrat rubber stamp.

He has turned out to be a bit better than expected:

Not a bad description of Matt Gaetz’s nomination for AG.

The left can’t keep up

I figure that by January, the left is going to have lost half of its people to heart attacks and strokes. Trump is announcing nomination after nomination.

He is announcing them so rapidly that the MSM can’t keep up and Trump is blowing the news cycle right out of the water.

I like winning

Conclusion

What has been your favorite nomination, so fart, and why?

Nerd Stuff

Had all the parts in hand. I opened up the case. Proceed to install the new NIC, another hard drive. Realize I need to go fetch a SATA cable. Go to plug in the power to the drive… Who the heck only puts one SATA power connector in a modern computer power supply!

ARGH.

The drive is still in the box, the correct adapters will be here shortly, and I will power up that drive and add it to the cluster.

Bloggers stepping over the line

Thursday, Allyson was shown a post by her BFF. The gist was, “if you voted for Trump, you are dead to me.” It wasn’t directed at Allyson, but Allyson was part of the target group.

Emotions are running high. For me, it is a joy and lightness I have not felt in years. I have taken delight in poking the leftists that have been melting down.

I have lived with the knowledge that the left will vandalize my property if I show support for the Republican Party. I’ve kept my mouth shut and just kept on keeping on.

Allyson has been on the left for so long, she didn’t believe my fears of being attacked for not toeing the Democrat party line.

Yesterday, she learned in a very personal way. And it hurt.

She wants compassion from the left. She wants them to be the good people she knew them to be. To have people she loved, and respected become unhinged broke her.

She will be posting. She has asked me to moderate her replies.

She broke the rule. She was a dick. She made person, if veiled, attacks on individuals. This will not and is not tolerated.

I’m sorry that it got to this point.

The Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy Dance

There are two Supreme Court Justices that have expressed an interest in leaving the court. Another is thinking about it. A fourth is in bad health.

Our guys will not Ruth it up. They will retire after the Snope opinion issues. That is my opinion. I think we might see another of our people retire.

It would be horrible if illness forced the last Justice to leave the court, but it would move another seat back to the constitution.

If this happens, we will have a majority of originalists on the Supreme court for the next 30 years, or more.

Trifecta

Not yet. We have the Senate. This allows us to put more constitutional originalists in the inferior courts. This is great. It means we can confirm Supreme Court nominees over the objections of the Democrats.

We have the Presidency. Even if they were to succeed in assassinating Trump, at this point, JD will become the president. He would become President four years earlier than I expect. Not particularly concerned — now. Monday, it was an issue.

We do not, yet, control the house. As of 2000, Thursday, we had 210 seats in the House. There are 27 seats still to be called. Some races are very close. We need 218.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Friends and Family

I lost my Mother and my Father this year. They passed. I lost my brother when he exposed his evil side. I hope I gained family in The Cousins.

My parents were Republicans until they drifted in to the propaganda of CNN. I never felt that I would be disowned for still being conservative when they no longer were.

Many of us have had to deal with friends and family that cannot tolerate those on the right. They have removed us from their lives.

If you have had an experience where a friend or family member who has expressed that you are still loved or still a friend, regardless of your politics, please share those positive stories.

I really need some positive stories about people on the left.

Please have a great weekend

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.

Post Schedules

The current scheduling is that I post once per day, unless Ally takes Tuesday Tunes.

Monday: Ally — Food
Tuesday: Chris — Tuesday Tunes
Wednesday: Ally — Politics, From Behind Enemy Lines
Thursday:
Friday: Chris — Friday Feedback, Ally — Prepping
Saturday:
Sunday:

I’m trying to do at least one Legal post per week. They take a long time to read, write and document. At times, it is overwhelming. A single case might have a few hundred pages per filing with hundreds of filings.

Court Progress

Some of the cases that I have been filing have started moving again. There is always the speed bump in the circuit courts after oral arguments and before they issue their opinion.

Prepping

Ally has been writing a series on how to prepare. If you would like to contribute an article, please send it to us as a LibreOffice, Google Doc, or a Microsoft Word document.

Bragging Rights/links

Ally wants to start a page of cross-links. If you make something that you want people to look at, send us the link where people can get it and a couple of paragraphs describing it along with a single image.

Smears

One of the things I noticed many years ago was that if a dogcatcher in bod ump boondocks makes a stupid remark, and they are a Republican or conservative, the media shoves a microphone into every well-known Republican demanding that they renounce said dogcatcher.

Some well-known Democrat does something outlandish or says something outlandish and there are crickets.

One of the things I think I am noticing is that conservatives are being smeared, in general, by the left searching out the little man, standing on a soapbox in front of 3 people spouting stupid stuff (and two are his mother and father, the third is the reporter). They take whatever this little man says and amplify it to an extreme.

This makes it seem like there is a loud call on the right to do the stupid things the little man talks about.

The other smear, of course, is directed at Trump. Some has-been model claims that he was hanging with Epstein, and while with Epstein touched her in a sexual manner without her consent.

Reminds me of the Borking of Judge Bork. The slander of Justice Thomas. The public lynching of Justice Kavanaugh.

Feedback

Have a fantastic weekend. We’d love to hear from you. Ask a question, send us on a topic hunt, share a news site of interest.

Indicators

We took my daughter’s care up to have work done on it. The auto shop is a local business doing great work. While there, we got into a discussion with a young lady.

She made the statement that she might be trading in her car sooner if the economy improves after the election. I.e., if Trump wins.

We got to talking politics. She asked if we are seeing more Trump signs this election.

This made me think about it. There are Trump signs in all the public places. As expected. There are a few more yard signs around, but still not many. It is as if people were worried about expressing their support for Trump. Go figure.

What I have noticed is that there are fewer Kamala/Walz signs. About half as many as I would expect.

Is this an indicator of how the election will go? I’m always unhappy when my state is shown as deep blue for the coming election. We were a red state. Then purple. Now dark blue.

The Interview

Ok, I didn’t watch it. I can’t stand to watch her talking, much less listen to her. X has been blowing up with just how badly she performed.

What was mind-boggling was the number of posts claiming she did well. Now if only the media would take off the kid gloves and interview Trump as aggressively as they did Kamala.

The ratio is beautiful. The question I had was, “why?” Why would they post something so ridiculous? Anybody who has half a brain knows that Trump is out there doing interviews, sometimes multiple interviews per day.

We have all seen just how biased the media is against him. It was on full display during the presidential debate.

The answer? In my opinion, the posts/tweets are not directed at The People. It is directed at the base.

The democrat base has been conditioned to treat anything that comes from the right as lies. Even though Fox has never been a “Right” media source, they were much more balanced than the other media sources. Thus, the left considers everything that Fox does as tainted, lies, misinformation.

That base is never going to watch the Fox interview of Kamala. What they will do is read these posts, have it confirmed by the rest of their bubble friends, and know that Kamala did a fantastic job in a hostile interview that got testy.

Document Library

I have copies of all of Gun Free Zone’s library. I will start putting them up. I’m also going to reach out to some of the other sites that have libraries to make copies to host here.

I have a fairly complete set of FMs that I downloaded from someplace. They will go up as well.

Technical Package

According to Ian, Gun Jesus, one of the reasons it is difficult to manufacture modern versions of older firearms is that we have lost the technical package.

If I understand it correctly, the Technical Package is the documents that give the directions on how to convert blueprints into actual objects.

As an example, it can be faster to drill a series of holes and then mill out the metal between the holes than to just mill a pocket. Those decisions are important.

Another example is documenting the order of operations. When machining an item, we need to determine the sequence that will be performed on the item. First op might be all the roughing operations. Second op would be the finishing operations. Third op would be the heat treat, and fourth op would be grinding to dimension.

Here is a different, simple instruction. The drawing for the AR15 lower receiver calls for a 0.376 +/- 0.001 hole for the selector switch. The easiest method to do this is to drill a 23/64 (0.3593) hole and then ream it to 0.376.

I do not believe I have ever seen a technical package for a firearm. I’d love to get one for the AR15/M4.

Homeowner Laments

Our house is one that “just grewed.” It was likely built as a summer cottage in the 40s. From there it was extended. Multiple times.

I’ve been able to piece out some of that growth. My office was likely a porch at some point, or mud room for people coming into the house. The reloading room, off the office and dining room, used to be a kitchen or bathroom. It still has a small sink in it.

The entrance to the basement was in the reloading room. At sometime in the past it was covered over. The stairs are still in the basement, leading up to a solid floor. Currently, the entrance to the basement is from the outside.

After expansion, the house had one full bath, between the master bedroom and a secondary bedroom. That is properly positioned for the water supply to the house and the sewage connection. The “new” kitchen is at the other end of the “old” part of the house. It was a separate extension.

The water from the kitchen sink used to go into a copper pipe that slanted across the width of the house and then down the length of the house to tie into the sewer line.

When they extended the house the last time, they added a second bathroom. This was at the opposite end of the house from the sewer connection. There was no way to get the waste from the second bathroom to the sewer connection by gravity alone.

This is not a problem. You use a sewage sump/ejector. This is a sealed tub that collects waste until the float valve turns on the ejector pump. The ejector pump then shoots the waste up the exhaust pipe to the ceiling of the basement where it can then travel, via gravity, to the sewer connection. All good.

We had an issue where the pooper shooter stopped shooting poop. This required my son and I to go through each clean out to make sure that nothing was stopping up the flow.

Nasty, yucky work. Finally, it required the plumber to come fix the pooper shooter proper. The issue? Grease from the kitchen sink had formed a dam at the bottom of the pooper shooter, keeping the pump from working.

So why is this an issue? Ever since that fix, we’ve had an off and on problem with horrible smells.

Today, I think I located the source.

One of those clean out plugs isn’t fully sealing. My fun for the weekend is to make sure that nobody flushes while I take the plug out, clean the threads, then replace the plug with sealer to keep the smell in the pipes.

Every so often, I wish I were a renter, again.

Question For You

If you were forced to travel in a hurry, to escape the zombie’s (democrat city dwellers) and were limited to one handgun and one rifle, what calibers would you choose?

I would love to have a carbine in .45 ACP. I don’t, so that puts the PC 9 and Glock right up there. On the other hand, I might take the Winchester Model ’94 in 30-30 with a 1911. Good stopping power without the scare factor.

The CETME in 7.62×51 sounds nice, but I’m not sure. M1 in 30-06?

Please let us know in the comments.

I’m exhausted. I’ve been pulling fiber for the last two days. All part of an infrastructure upgrade.

Normally, pulling cable in a modern datacenter is pretty easy. This is not a modern datacenter.

The original cable runs were CAT6 with RJ45 connectors. When the cables were installed, the installation had to be nondestructive. No holes in walls, no holes in floors. Hide the cables as best you can.

One of the cables we removed was to a defunct workstation. It had been run across the floor and then covered with a protective layer to keep it from getting cut or snagged. The outer insulation had been ripped away. There was bare copper showing. Fortunately, that particular workstation hasn’t been in place for a few years.

The backbone switch was mounted in the basement. Not a real issue. The people who pulled some of the last cable didn’t bother to put in any cable hangers. So it had loops just dangling.

There were drops that could not be identified. Those are now disconnected, but nobody complained, so nothing was taken offline.

I’ve found a new favorite cable organizer.

Cable Management Wire Organizer

These are reusable. They open fully and will hold many cat6 and even more fiber. They have the 3M foam double-sided tape on them. This works great against smooth, clean surfaces.

The place where they shine is that they also have a hole designed for a #6 screw. In places where there were no smooth surfaces, much less clean surfaces. The sticky held them in place long enough to drive a screw.

There are no more dangling cables.

My only hope is that there are no more configuration issues with the new switch. *caugh*DHCP*caugh*

Nerd Babble

“Switch in the wrong direction…” oh my, that does sound bad.

We use VLANs for isolating network traffic. Our switches will happily forward all VLANs as on all ports. So a tagged VLAN on port 1 will be transmitted to port 2, if port two responds with an answer on the VLAN. It all just works.

The new switches are configured so that all the ports are in “access” mode. Access mode means that VLAN traffic does not move across the switch. All of our testing showed that the new switches would just work.

They did, for the primary, untagged network. Unfortunately, the new switch is “smarter” and refused to forward VLAN traffic.

The idea of a port in “access” mode is that you can plug an IoT item, think security camera, into a port. All traffic from that port is then forwarded as VLAN traffic, by configuration. This means that the IoT item doesn’t need to support VLANs nor do you have to configure it.

By changing the ports to the correct setting, things just started to work.

FEMA

“We are the government, and we are here to fuck things up.”

I’m getting some back channel reports that things have gone kinetic down in the disaster area. These are good ol’ boys and they understand the three S’s. Shoot, Shovel, Shut up.

My reports say that looters were hitting some communities. The looters have gone missing. SSS.

It is unclear if the looters in question had government ID.

The number of reports of the government messing things up down there is growing daily.

The latest story was of one of the helicopter teams having rescued an elderly couple attempted to get them checked into a local hotel, outside the disaster area. They were turned away because there were no vacancies.

The hotel was filled with government employees.

The pilot was talking about how they had been living out of their trucks so that there was room for those that needed it in the hotels.

Seems the government is not as thoughtful.

Pay careful attention to the words coming out of the puppet and his handlers.

They appear to have deployed 1000 men to the disaster area. They are claiming that these 1000 men are joining 6000 men already on the ground at work.

Yes, there are 6000 military men on the ground, getting the job done. They are volunteers there as citizens, not as government employees. They are not under the command of anybody in the government.

Don’t trust what the MSM says, don’t trust what the government says. Verify everything. Don’t trust my words, check for yourself.

Ally suggests TikTok. I’m using X.

Iran, the Target

Watching my feed blowup over the last 48 hours regarding Iran’s open attack on Israel has been mind-blowing. Hundreds of accounts showing the same footage of explosions in the distance while claiming huge victories for Iran.

Israel’s ability to wage war was not affected. We know because of the targeted strikes carried out Thursday night.

Query

Does anybody have firsthand knowledge of what’s going on down in the disaster area?

Three steps forward, 2 steps back, we should be stable.

Nerd stuff: We upgraded our infrastructure, again. We moved from a copper to a fiber backbone. Server links are now up to 25Gbit/second. Everything went smoothly until we started our final tests. It appears that the new switch defaulted ports in the wrong direction.

This default blocked traffic from our distributed network file system. The switch has been beaten into submission, and is now performing its duties correctly.

Personal

It has been difficult for me since my Father passed. It isn’t that I interacted with him that much, it is that the safety net is gone. In addition, it turns out that my brother is pretty darn evil.

This is as close as I’ve come to talking about his actions in public.

In the midst of this, a client I work with stepped up as a friend. The 30 minutes of dumping and ranting made things a little better.

Thank you my friend.

What you don’t know (Nerd)

I started doing network administration in 1985 time frame. We were using 10base2 and X.25. Most of our equipment communicated with the mainframes via 9600 baud connections.

Having blazing fast 5Mb connections was spectacular. We used NFS extensively.

Our long haul communications were done via a 56Kbit connection.

When I started work in Maryland, we were still using 10base2 with a few 10baseT hubs. It was “fast enough”.

Later, some of our machines started showing up with high-speed networking, 100baseT. With jumbo packets, we were starting to get there.

Still later, we started using Fiber, this got us up to around 155Mb. This meant, for the first time, our network was faster than our local drives. Using NFS was no longer a bottleneck, for those machines that were fiber attached to each other.

The house network has been a 1Gbit network for a few years. I found out in the last couple of weeks that my primary machine is actually 2.5Gbit. Unfortunately, all the switches and routers in the house top out at 1Gbit.

Today I installed my first 10Gbit switch. It has 4 2.5Gbit RJ45 ports and 2 10Gbit SFP+ ports. This has 3 ceph nodes plugged into it. Those nodes will get NIC upgrades in the future to take them up to 10Gibit speeds.

I have one SFP+ module, it is a 10Gbit RJ45 connector. This means that it connects back to the main house switch at 10Gbit. The main house switch only supports 1Gbit today.

So what is the plan? I will be deploying a dual network system in the house. The server boxes/nodes will have 10Gbit NICs in them, each with two ports. One will connect to the high-speed network, the other to the 1Gbit network.

The 10Gbit net will handle all the Ceph and Docker traffic. Locally mounted ceph file systems will use the loop back connection, or they will be attached to the 10Gbit network.

This will make the ceph file systems seem much faster.

This will be accomplished with 3 4+2 switches and one 8 SFP+ switch. It should all just work.

Except, I had to learn all about fiber. I’ve decided to connect these switches with fiber. After far too many pages of documentation, I’ve decided on LC to LC connectors on OM4 cables. Some cables will be rated for outdoor, underground. This is basically an armored cable. The others will be properly rated for the areas they are in.

According to my reading, these OM4 cables should be good to around 40Gbit with the right transceivers and switches.

It is all Trump’s Fault

I’m getting disgusted by leftist idiots thinking that everything is Trump’s fault. Somebody shoots Trump? It is his nasty words and tweets that are the cause. Somebody sets up an ambush for Trump? His fault for pointing out that illegal immigrants are eating pets.

Trump is doing a meet and greet at a grocery store. The lady checking out loses track of the total and goes over budget. Trump peels off some bills and hands it to the cashier to take care of that lady’s shortfall, as well as others in the store.

The left accuses him of buying votes.

The Supreme Court respects the law, the outcome-driven leftists on the court spit and sputter and the left screams that Trump, who is too stupid to tie his shoes, foresaw these cases and picked justices to rule in this way, per his bidding.

If Trump were to run into a burning building to save a child, the media, and the left would scream he was stealing jobs from hardworking Firefighters.

In the same vain, a group representing the immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have filed suit against Trump and Vance for defaming the poor hardworking immigrants.

Note, they are “legally” in Springfield because they entered the US via a port of entry and claimed asylum.

Take a look at —HVGIQ: Haiti, Human Varieties, (last visited Sep. 27, 2024) to see the probable quality of these immigrants.

Assassination Attempts

This is getting old. Trump is currently averaging two assassination attempts per month. This does count Iran posting a fantasy about how they are going to use their super high-tech equipment to kill Trump.

Skills

Ally was doing her look through Craig’s list and such when she noticed that somebody was giving away a floor loom.

We are now the proud owners of a 4 shaft, 6 treadle 40″ floor loom in excellent shape. We will need to replace the reed, get some shuttles, and make a raddle and then dress the loom.

I will need to dig up my weaving books and likely purchase a few. Ally wants to make some period dishrags and a Hudson Blanket. Both of those sound like fun projects.

It Wasn’t My Fault!

I’ve been fighting some new infrastructure and deployment things. In physical premises, we use physically different networking gear for isolation and redundancy. If we want to get fancy, we can set up VPCs and pretend that one physical network is multiple logical networks.

I’ve been using VLANs to accomplish the isolation I want.

On the cloud, I would like to use VPCs. The datacenter I use doesn’t support VPCs. They do offer VLANs. I choose to use them.

The magic of their VLAN is that you create them on the fly. In the GUI, you say “attach a VLAN to interface ETH1”. It then asks you to name the VLAN. All other nodes then use the same name, and they are added to the same VLAN.

The downside is that there is no explicit method to delete a VLAN. If all nodes that were using the VLAN detach the VLAN, then the VLAN is deleted.

For testing, I have a script that deletes all my nodes and all the volumes associated with those nodes. This only takes a few minutes to run.

After I verify that the nodes and volumes are gone, I can start the ansible script to provision the needed nodes, configure them, boot them, configure the OS, install ceph on 4 nodes, docker swarm on 3, and then install the database engines.

Pretty cool. The process of provisioning an instance includes saying that I want a VLAN with a particular tag.

When I ran the playbooks, everything worked correctly. Except that one of my nodes refused to talk to the other nodes on the VLAN.

After escalating, it turns out that some nodes were attached to the old VLAN, which was in the process of being deleted, and the others were in the new VLAN.

It is my belief this was cased by a race condition. Some nodes were assigned the old VLAN while the VLAN was being deleted. The other nodes requested the old VLAN and instead were granted a new one, with the same name as the old one.

*ARGH.* That was many wasted hours.

When was your last range day? What did you take with you