Skills

In upgrading from copper to fiber, I’ve been exploring the different options and learning as I go. Some learning curves have been steep, others have been “relearning” what I already knew.

One of the biggest things I needed to learn is that there are “switches” that are actually “routers”. That was mind-bending.

The other is that the network dudes talk about VLAN and Tagged VLAN. They are different things. In the environments I’ve been working in, there are only tagged VLANs which are called “VLAN”. Same name, different meaning.

The starting place when moving from copper to fiber is to understand what a Small Form-Factor Pluggable is. This is the magic that makes it all happen. This is standardized into SFP and SFP+. The SFP standard only supports 1G and lower speeds.

The SFP+ supports higher speed modules. 10G, 25G, 40G and 100G are all standards I’ve seen.

I’m only working with 10G modules, at this time.

They have modules that are RJ45 copper that will run at slower speeds or up to 10G. The only issue is that they draw more power and run hot. Can’t touch them when running hot.

The fix for this is to purchase a switch or router that has RJ45 Ethernet ports and at least one SFP+ port.

I found a small, six port, switch. This comes with 4 RJ45 ports, rated at 2.5G each, and 2 SFP+ ports rated at 10G each. Cool.

This allows me to daisy-chain them if I wanted.

In reality, it meant that I had one host connected at 10G while the others were at 2.5G.

I also found a L2/L3 “switch” that looks much like the switch above.

Having done the upgrades, I started looking into upgrading the router between the outside world and the DMZ. The routers I’ve been getting to not support any crypto, so they don’t have good VPN capability, something I want.

So I went looking. Looking for a “motherboard with SFP”. Something interesting popped. A mini ITX motherboard with 4 SFP+ ports and 4 RJ45 ports along with HDMI, VGA and the standard USB ports. It also provided space for two M.2 SSD modules, 2 DDR4 slots and two 6GByte SATA ports.

It might not be the fastest computer on the block, but it looks like a good starting point.

This leads me to other motherboards of the same ilk. And what I found was a bunch of these motherboards. And the port layouts all look the same. The specifications all look the same.

What we have is a “standard” motherboard which is put in a “standard” case along with a wall wart, HDMI cable and a mounting bracket. The branding stays the same.

I have an L2 switch that I’m going to take apart in a bit. It has a limit of 1550 byte packets, making it useless for my new network. I wonder if I will find an M.2 module in that box or something else that allows me to change the software.

Meanwhile, that motherboard is on my wish list. I’ll load pfSense on it along with FRR and replace my current router. Giving me a considerable boost in capabilities and letting me dispense with the VyOS configuration language. Which I really don’t like.

This is the prime time to test your preparations. Christmas is over, but people are not settled. It’s not “usual” scheduling because kids are off school, and you may be off work. So… Go turn off your power at the main breaker.

Why? The answer is that preparation only works if you’re actually… prepared. You cannot KNOW that you’re prepared until you test your preparations. That’s where turning off the power comes in.

In my house, the first thing to happen if the power goes out is to locate light sources. Immediately, that might mean the flashlight on my phone, but only briefly. I want to keep the power up on the phone in case I need it as a phone. I find the flashlights, candles, oil lamps, and I get at least one lamp lit. This means I have fire, which means the world gets that much easier. With one tiny bit of fire on hand, I can start numerous others.

When the kids were little, the next item at hand would be child wrangling. If it was daytime, the kids would be sat down near the wood stove with books appropriate to their age, or a game to play that wasn’t electronic, and told to stay out of the way. If they got in the way, they got to do “fun things” like shovel and gather wood and other stuff they hated. When they were little (under 10), it was easier to keep them busy and out from underfoot.

As they got older, the kids were expected to do many of the “power outage” tasks on their own. It was their job to locate flashlights and solar lamps and make sure they worked. One was set to starting the fire, if it wasn’t already. The other went around and turned off all the light switches and other power hogs, so that we wouldn’t overload the circuit when power came back on. If the power was going to be out for more than 24 hours, items in the fridge were moved to our inside but unheated porch (it gets cold, but rarely below freezing) to keep them fresh. Frozen items went into the outdoor freezers, which would stay frozen for a very long time.

After a few practice runs, we had it down to an art form. Everyone did their jobs, and within a half hour, the entire house was ready for there to be no power for however long was necessary. We had blankets over windows to hold in heat, pulled out sleeping bags so that they were ready for night, if we wanted to sleep in our beds, had easy to prepare foods on hand in case we were tired from shoveling or whatever. Everything just worked.

The house went without power for anywhere from several hours to a few days on a number of occasions. We’ve always been fine. The wood stove sits over the water pipes in the basement, so the residual heat keeps them from freezing. We always have access to water, even if we have to go tromping to get it. We know how to make sure water is potable, too. By nightfall, we usually had everything in place, and we were all cuddled up by the wood stove, reading or talking or playing cards.

It’s not difficult, but it is complex. There are a lot of moving parts to get figured out, and until you put them all to the test, you don’t KNOW how it’s going to work. It’s much better to do some test runs long before you actually require all this stuff to be working. Make your family a well oiled machine before the emergency happens, and the emergency won’t be catastrophic.

Okay, I made these because they seemed funny and amusing, and very retro. I am making more because they’re also easy and REALLY yummy. They also have a lot less sugar than some of the cookies I’ve seen out there, which is nice. This is based on an early 1970s Jello recipe.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder
• 1-1/2 cups butter (room temperature)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 package (3 ounces) jello gelatin, any flavor
• 1 egg (room temperature)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat your oven to 400°F. It doesn’t take long to pull the cookie dough together, so you should be ready about the time it comes up to temperature!

Sift your flour and baking powder together. I don’t normally do that, but because these are technically spritz cookies, the dough is supposed to be very soft. Sifting helps the dough come together the way it should. If you don’t have a sifter on hand, pour your flour and baking powder into a strainer and tap the side of it until all the ingredients fall through.

In a separate container, cream your butter. If you’re doing it by hand, you can use a fork or whisk, and work it. I recommend using a stand mixer, however. Using the wire whisk attachment, whip the butter until it’s soft and fluffy. At that point, add in the sugar and Jello packet, about a quarter cup at a time, creaming it well after each addition. This makes the dough very light and fluffy, which is necessary. Add the egg and vanilla, and continue to beat well.

Gradually add in the flour mixture, and ensure that  you mix well enough that the dough is smooth each time before adding the next portion. About half way through the process, if you’re using the whisk attachment, you’ll want to switch to the paddle attachment on your mixer. The dough gets a bit thick, though continues to be light and fluffy.

There are two ways to make the cookies. They both start with lining two or three baking sheets with parchment paper. Do not grease them.

For shaped cookies, force the dough through a cookie press. Decorate however you wish.

For round cookies, use your hands to make inch-wide balls of the dough, and place them onto the parchment paper. Lightly grease the bottom of an appropriately sized glass or cup, and press gently into the dough to make it into a circle. It ends up looking almost like a wax seal, to be honest. Again, decorate as you wish. This is the method I used, and I put on sprinkles to most of my cookies. I just shook them on, then pressed very gently with clean hands to seat the sprinkles into the dough. I also did one batch with “snow” on top, by baking them and adding powdered sugar AFTER they came out of the oven but when they were still very hot. To do “snow” you add a tablespoon of powdered sugar to a small sieve and then tap the side of it over the cookies. The sugar will fall through and dust the top of the cookies. You can even use pre-cut shapes like stars and trees to decorate with “snow”.

Bake your cookies for 13 to 15 minutes, or until they’re golden brown at the edges. They can be frozen, or they can be stored in a loosely covered container.

Notes:

I used orange jello for my first batch, and the result was very tasty. The “snow” batch had a sort of orange creamsicle flavor to it, and the rest it was hard to taste the jello. The color definitely comes through, though. I also used margarine for my cookies, since I can’t digest dairy. They turned out just fine!

I own a pocket watch. It is beautiful, but I don’t use it very often.

I know that I own a couple of watches. One of them is a battery powered solar recharging thing.

My standard “watch” today is my cell phone.

When I was in high school, I was very interested in accurate time keeping. As was my father.

This meant that we would call the “time” phone number to set our watches, at least once a week.

My grandfather had a “railroad watch”. This was a wristwatch that was approved by the railroad for time keeping. It was approved by the SooLine for use as a time keeping device. Amazing, until that model of watch was approved, the railroad required the use of pocket watches.

This was because a level of accuracy was required that only pocket watches or well regulated wristwatches could maintain.

The big thing in my youth were “quartz” watches. Instead of using a tuning fork or a mechanical balance/regulator, they used the vibrations of a quartz crystal to keep track of the time.

What this meant was that you had devices that were now able to maintain the same wrong time over an extended period of time.

The user had to set them correctly.

As an example, for years, maybe even to today, my wife would set her car clock (and many other clocks) 10 minutes fast. “So she would be on time for appointments.”

I set my car to my phone’s reported time.

One of the fun things that I did as a kid was to call up the Naval Observatory to get the current time. This was reported from their atomic clock. One of the most accurate time keeping devices in the world.

Accurate Time

Many protocols require accurate time. It is wonderful that you have a time piece that is accurate to within 1 second per year, but if it is reporting the wrong time, it is not particularly useful to the protocol.

What we want, is to know what time it is right now, and then to set our time to that.

We get the current time from a known, accurate time source. Today, that is often GPS satellites.

If you have ever wondered how GPS works, it works because your device knows where each satellite is at any instant of time. Each satellite transmits its ID and the current time. Over and over again.

That is all they do.

And here is the magic, if your device knows what time it is, and it knows where the satellite should be at his time, it can calculate the distance by comparing the difference in time.

If you are directly under a GPS satellite, it takes about 67ms for the signal to reach your device. From this, we can use the speed of light to figure out the distance traveled. Then some simple math and we know the location of your device.

We can also get accurate time by listening for the atomic clocks via radio. If you know where you are, and you know where the clock is, you can calculate the delay between the atomic clock and your device, then match your device to the atomic clock.

Today, when people want to use that type of process, they use a GPS device and get the time ticks from the device.

How long did it take?

This is where it starts to get complicated.

The standard for communications with a GPS device is 4800 or 9600 baud across a 3 wire serial connection. The protocol, the text being transmitted, specifies the time when the last character is transmitted.

That data is being received. Your device is processing it. Your device takes a certain amount of time to process the record it just received. It takes time to process that record. All of that is latency.

If you do not know the latency in your device, you do not know what time it is. For grins, just think of that serial link being 300,000,000 meters long. That would put a 1-second latency by itself.

There are ways of calculating the latency, but I do not remember what they are.

Latency is the important piece of information.

Calculating Latency

Many network people have run ping. It is a tool for testing reachability and latency between your device and some other device on the Internet.


ping -c 5 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=116 time=11.6 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=5 ttl=116 time=11.0 ms

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 11.022/11.179/11.616/0.220 ms


This is a test from one of my faster machines to a Google DNS server. This tells me that it takes 11.179 ms to reach that DNS server. Testing to one of my network timeservers, the average is 78.094 ms.

This means that the time reported by the timeserver will be off by some amount. In a simple world, we would guess that it is 1/2 of 78.094.

But, I use NTP. NTP does many transmissions to multiple timeservers to discover the actual time. It is reporting that the latency is 78.163512 ms. A little more accurate. It tells me that the dispersion is 0.000092 ms.

How does it know this? Because of many samples and because of four different time stamps.

When my device sends an NTP request packet, it puts the current time in it. When the server receives the packet, it puts the current time in it. When the server transmits the response, it adds the current time again. Finally, when the reply is received, the current time is added to the packet. This gives us four different time stamps from two different sources.

We compute the total latency via mine(R)-mine(S). We know the processing time by server(S)-server(R). The difference between server(R)-mine(S) and mine(R)-server(S) as the symmetry between the two paths the request and response traveled.

From these values, we can calculate the network distance, in seconds, between us and them.

Assume we transmit at time 0(M), it is received at 100(S), the response is transmitted at 105(S) and we receive it at 78(M).

How can we receive our reply before the server sent it? Easy, we have to different views of what time it is.

The latency is 78. This means that the halfway point was at 38. It took 5 to process the reply and get it on the wire again. If we do simple stuff, this means that our time is off from their time by 67.

But we can do better. By looking at the reported latency between the two legs, we can actually calculate how long it took for us to receive the reply.

NTP uses multiple timeservers to get a consensus as to the time. It monitors each timeserver to determine which one jitters the least.

All of this means that we can have very accurate times.

And having accurate measurements of the time, NTP will calculate how much the computer’s clock drifts over time. It will then modify the clock rate in parts per million to get the drift as close to zero as possible.

This means, that the longer your device runs NTP, the more accurate it becomes.

So last week I wrote about what cool gifts you can find on the internet and beyond, to give as gifts to your favorite prepper. This week I want to talk about making Christmas gifts.

There’s a lot of crap out there, people. In the grand scheme of things, do we really need snap lights and solar generators and Leatherman tools? We might want them, but they aren’t necessary. What’s necessary is food, shelter, warmth, and love. With all the commercialism at this time of year, I think we forget that.

This Christmas, I’m making bread for people. I’m baking cookies. I’m sewing cute little boxes to store things in. I’m making ornaments out of scraps, and cross stitching things. Why am I making things? Because there is no greater gift I can give than my time.

If I had the money, I could get everyone flashy stuff from Walmart or Amazon. I did get a few things that are useful and fun. But even when I had more money, I tended to make at least some of my gifts. When I don’t make them I try to buy local, from artists and folk in my neighborhood, because I want to support the people who live around me.

What kind of gifts can you make? Well, cookies are always a good one. I’m making Jello cookies this year, which I originally tried because they sounded funny, and am continuing to make because they’re both cool and tasty. I pulled out my holiday sprinkles and am tossing them on the dough, and I end up with these beautiful little cookies I can put in a decorative bag and gift to my friends and family. You can make things like a sugar scrub, or flavored oils and vinegars, or hot chocolate kits (with or without a side of Bailey’s Irish Cream).

If you’re of a Certain Generation, you might consider making a “mixed tape” playlist on YouTube for a loved one. Or make a movie night, and pick a movie, get popcorn and your favorite sweet snack, cuddle up on the couch, and enjoy a glass of wine. Make a coupon book full of things like, “Take out the garbage,” and “Unload the dishwasher,” for when your loved one is feeling overwhelmed.

Beyond all this giving of gifts, homemade or otherwise, is the idea that if the world were a bit different we might not have Amazon or Target to get gifts from. Think about what would have been worthy to gift your partner a hundred years ago, or if there were no stores within driving distance and no Amazon delivery available. What things could you give or do that would be memorable, and show the depth and breadth of your love and devotion?

I am feeling less like we’re going to have a civil war these days, but I think about this stuff, because we *could* have one. Bad things could happen at any moment. We need to stay on our toes, and be vigilant. Sometimes, that’s the best gift of all.

A conflagration of DIY gift ideas:

• from Country Living
• from Pioneer Woman
• from Good Housekeeping
• from The Spruce

The Internet is a fantastic creature. I’m not speaking of the information you can find on the internet. Nor am I speaking of the entertainment that is available on the Internet.

The mere fact that you can ask for information at your desk or on your phone and somehow that request gets there, and the response gets back, is mind bogglingly complex.

Here is the dirty little secret about computers. It is all zeros and ones. There are no pictures, there are no videos, there are no songs nor even text, it is all zeros and ones.

We group these zeros and ones into units of different sizes. The three primary sizes are 8, 32, and 64, with a spattering of 16. At the lowest level, we think about these in groups of 8, called octets.

You might know them as “Bytes”.

Now, zeros and ones are a bit difficult to read and write. So we use base 16 to read and write bytes.

Base 16 has 16 digits, just like base 10 has 10 digits. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. are the digits of base 10.

For base 16, we add A, B, C, D, E, and F as the six extra digits.

So we have a 32-bit number that looks like this: 4C4F5645 in hex (base 16) and 1280267845 in base 10, and “LOVE” as ASCII.

It is all zeros and ones. It takes meaning when we decide how those bits will be interpreted.

When you ask Google to search for “The Vine of Liberty”, your browser starts with a name, which it needs to convert to an address. The name is “www.google.com”. Depending on where you are, one of the addresses will be 142.250.69.68.

This is a different representation of a 32-bit word. In this “dotted quad”, each number represents the decimal value of an 8-bit byte.

For you, the simple household, your device asks, “How can I get this message to 142.250.69.68?”

Your device looks up the address in the “routing table”. Your device likely only has a single entry in the routing table. The route of last resort, or default route.

When no other table entries match, then send the request to a default router

A router has a single job, to move packets (requests and responses) from one network to another. When your default router receives your device’s request, it looks up the IP address (142.250.69.68) in its routing table. Again, it is likely that there is only a single entry in that table, the default route.

This is the simple way that things work in simple networks. It continues to work until the moment when a router has to make a choice. Does it send the packet from network H (your home network) to network A or to network B.

That router will have a routing table. It will find a match for 142.250.69.68 in that table, which will tell that router which network to forward your request to.

If nothing about the Internet ever changed, that would be all that was needed. Every router would know how to get to every address and that would be it.

But it isn’t that easy. The Internet changes, constantly. This means that we need to be able to change those routing tables quickly and easily.

The answer to that issue is a routing protocol. The oldest was RIP. It doesn’t work well today as it sends too much data too often. Back in slower networking times, RIP was taking up nearly 70% of my bandwidth. We stopped that.

There are two major types of routing protocols, external and internal. The primary external protocol, today, is the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. I don’t have to worry about that.

What I do need to worry about is internal routing. For internal routing, I use a combination of static routes and OSPF.

And this is where it gets complex. The data center has two physical networks. A management network and a production network.

The management network runs on a single subnet, with each host having a unique address on that subnet.

The production network runs on multiple subnets, each subnet serving to isolate problems. In addition, traffic on the production network needs to be able to reach the Internet.

The management network requires zero routing. One network space. No connection to the outside world.

On top of the physical network are layered multiple other networks. There is the OVN NAS network. This is how each of the hypervisors gets access to block storage (and shared file systems). There is the OVN NAS data network. There is the OVN VM network, the container network.

In addition, there are other networks used inside the container environment.

Some of these networks exist in isolation. Others are used as transport networks. No traffic originates nor terminates in these transport networks.

But other networks need to be able to speak to each other.

That means that every device needs to know how to reach every address. This means that OSPF is doing magic all the time to make things work.

Why? Redundancy. Every device has at least two paths to the next hop. If the primary link fails, the secondary link takes over.

This is done by rebuilding the routing table.

OVN links don’t fail (unless the idiot driving the keyboard does something stupid). The physical network can fail. When this happens, OVN just routes the tunnels in different directions.

So why this rant?

Because I can’t get parts of this to work!

My need is to move the containers into the OVN.

And I can’t get routing to work consistently. ARGH!

Oh well. Filler done.

I love making different feasts. It pleases me to no end to come up with some new recipe based on something I saw in passing online. This recipe is based on something I saw on TikTok, and another recipe that I skimmed through on Facebook.

Ingredients:

• pork ribs (2 per person, roughly)
• barbecue sauce (your favorite)
• orange juice
• cranberries
• salt, pepper, paprika, thyme, oregano, red pepper flakes

Grease a large oven-safe pot or pan, deep enough to contain all the ribs plus the liquids. I use no-stick spray, but you could use any fat, really. Preheat your oven to 250F.

Place your ribs into the pan in whatever manner you like, but in a single layer. Don’t stack them on top of each other, or some will be delicious and the rest will be hard and yucky. While the oven preheats, whisk together the barbecue sauce and juice, then add in the spices until it’s right for you. You want enough to cover the top of your ribs, but not to drown them. They’ll make their own liquid as they cook, so you just need to coat the top.

Cover the top of the ribs with the sauce, using a brush to get all the nooks and crannies. Add in the whole, fresh cranberries or some dried ones (or dried cherries, or whatever floats your boat here). Cover the pan with a lid or tin foil, and place in the oven. Bake for 2 hours.

After 2 hours, check on the ribs. They should be partially cooked (pork ribs are fully cooked when they reach an internal temperature of 210F, but they also tend to fall apart when you try to take their temperature, so you can just judge it by that if you like) at this point. Move the ribs around if some of them are sticking out or looking dry, but otherwise, just check on them. Raise the temperature of your oven to 350F, and continue to bake, covered, until the pork is falling apart and ready. You’ll know it’s ready when it basically falls apart when you poke it with a fork.

Serve up hot, with delicata squash and fresh made spinach noodles.

Notes:

I spooned the liquid out of the pot over my noodles, and it was FANTASTIC. I made the noodles myself, although they were a bit soft. I didn’t add enough flour to the recipe. Still, they were tender and quite yummy. And green LOL!

Okay, today’s post is a bit of a cheat, but what can I say. I like to window shop, even when the window is Amazon. LOL!

There are a ton of items out there that would make excellent gifts for the Prepper in your life. I hope you find some of these to be of use.

• Weather Radio, USB Charger, combo with great ratings
• Flatpack solar lantern
• The P38 stocking stuffer special
• Power Bank/solar charger
• Zip ties, because if someone says they have enough, they’re lying
• A garden starter kit
• Thermal blankets, because they’re very useful
• SAM Splints, because you may need them some day

It’s just a little list. It’s one I think is worthwhile looking into. Create your own. If you have young ‘uns or teens, give them a Get Home bag for part of their stocking. Plan out your garden for next year and get all the seeds as stocking stuffers. Heck, get seeds you can start indoors now, and plant outside when it gets warmer.

There are some items that are “always buy” in my opinion, like the zip ties and thermal blankets. No matter how many you have, more is always a good thing. Also in that list would be paracord on the roll, small first aid kits, rain ponchos that fit in a purse… There are so many ideas.

Happy holidays, folks. No matter what you celebrate, this is a month full of holy days, and may each of you find something soul comforting over this month.

I adore sausage gravy and biscuits. They’re the ultimate comfort food. The biscuits are a wee bit sweet, and the sausage gravy is a bit spicy and savory and creamy, all at once. I always make mine with an egg, though you can do what you want with yours.

Ingredients for the sausage gravy:

• 1 lb ground sausage meat (Jones or Jimmy Dean work well)
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 to 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp all purpose flour
• 1 to 2 cups of milk (regular, cream, or non-dairy is fine)

In a large pan, brown your ground sausage meat over a medium heat. You want it to be thoroughly cooked, but not crispy or burned. Drain off the fat, and reserve it (pro tip: add a lining of tin foil to a bowl and strain your fat into it… after, use what you want by spooning it out, then discard the rest, wrapped up in the foil). Remove the sausage and set aside.

Add 2 tablespoons of the fat back into your pan and add in the onion. Saute over a medium heat until the onion until becomes soft and opaque. Add in the garlic and stir continuously for about 30 seconds to a minute. You want the garlic to be fragrant, but not brown or crisp. Add extra fat if necessary.

Sprinkle the onion mixture with the flour, and stir with a wooden spoon until it’s incorporated and clumpy. If it’s very loose and saucy, you may need a bit more flour. If it’s all white and not mixing into the onion, you may need a bit more fat. The idea is to make a roux.

Lower your heat to just below medium. Pour in your milk very slowly, about a quarter cup at a time, and stir gently and constantly with a wooden spoon. Work on getting rid of any lumps or bits of unincorporated flour to ensure your gravy comes out smooth. Continue to add your milk until the gravy is a good consistency for you. You want to end up with a smooth, fairly thick gravy that is easy to stir and has no lumps.

If your gravy “breaks,” meaning it separates into lumpy bits and oily liquid, you can fix it. Add warm water a tablespoon at a time and whisk vigorously in between. This should allow your gravy to emulsify again, and get creamy. The water must be warm, not hot or cold, for this to work.

Once your gravy is how you like it, add the sausage back in and stir to mix it well. Set aside until your biscuits are done!

Now it’s time to make the biscuits!

Read More

My first fiber switch turned out to be a L3 managed “switch”. Way cool. But I purchased a cheap switch and found that it completely undocumented.

It has taken me a while to figure things out.

The configuration GUI is an What You See Is All You Get type. There is enough there that you can get the switch up and running, but not enough to fully configure the L3 Switch.

To accomplish that, you need to use the CLI. Not a problem, I like CLI’s.

Of course, there is no documentation but for tab completion and very limited help screens.

I get it mostly working.

After playing with the Free Range Routing Suite (FRR) for a while and getting OSPF working on all of my hosts and the primary router, I was feeling pretty confident.

It seems that FRR took their configuration model almost directly from Cisco’s CLI. The number of times I used a Cisco help page to determine how to configure an OSPF setting is remarkable.

The new L3 switch turns out to have a Cisco like configuration language. And what isn’t Cisco like, is FRR like. Neither Cisco nor FRR, but close.

Today I had a tremendous success, I moved a ceph host from the physical network to the OVN network.

This included moving that segment of the network to a new subnet. And everything sort of worked.

The issue turned out to be a routing issue.

The correct answer is to turn on OSPF within the new physical router. It does support it, after all.

Having played with the damn thing for a few hours, breaking my network multiple times, I was about to give up when I happened to notice a strange value for a setting.

That setting? MTU, of course.

Even though every interface shows an MTU of 9000. Even though jumbo frames are turned on and using a 9000 byte frame.

Even though an MTU of 9000 is very much supported, the MTU of the “VLAN” was set to 1500.

Now, Cisco VLANs are not the same as a tagged VLAN. A tagged VLAN acts like a separate physical network. They are where you place interface settings. These VLANs can then be assigned to a physical port.

The physical port’s MTU overrides the VLAN MTU. This means my jumbo packets from host to host work.

The problem is that the VLAN MTU is maxed out at 2000 bytes. This seems to only affect the OSPF traffic and not the physical interface. But I’m dead in the water or I need to figure out how to do this differently.

Still, I didn’t pay an arm plus a leg for this physical router. I’ll get it to work.