Tuesday and pics

content/blog/wk14day2.md

@@ -1,7 +1,69 @@
 ---
-title: "Week 14, Tuesday:"
+title: "Week 14, Tuesday: Patches Galore"
 date: 2024-10-29T21:55:00+02:00
-draft: true
 ---
 
-{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/todo.png" alt="Credit: " >}}
+{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/dreamscape-03.png" alt="Credit: Dreamscape, Kush Sessions, YouTube" >}}
+
+This morning my buddy Arend sends me a message on Telegram - and asks me if I can check the port in
+Qupra. Oh my deity, it's finally happening! After the general assembly of Coloclue approved a
+member's petition to allow members to install cross connects at Qupra, a few months of "kastje, muur"
+happened, and the networking committee and association board reached an agreement on how this would
+happen.
+
+A few months after that, Arend tried to install a crossconnect but we weren't ready paper-wise. I
+brought it back to the attention of the networking committee and we identified the missing pieces: a
+patch panel with keystones needed to be installed in each rack (and it was only available in two of
+the racks at the time), and a change to the administrative database needed to be added to document
+which members had which crossconnects.
+
+Tim took care of the first thing - he ordered the panels and keystones and went to the datacenter to
+install them. I offered to take careo f the second thing - but since the administrative database has
+need-to-know information, our treasurer Arjan preferred to add the records himself. Once these two
+things were taken care of, all I had to do is wait for a practical moment :) I had planned to deploy
+the fiber myself last week, but I had to cancel my trip to Amsterdam due to the COVID situation.
+
+So I was surprised and delighted that Arend pinged me. The Qupra FrysIX switch was pre-configured,
+and all that was left was to plug things in. Arend made quick work of it, and as well put in the
+cross connect for a few other members at Coloclue, he's such a sweetheart! For me, this link will be
+used to alleviate the hypervisor at Equinix AM3, as it is running low on disk throughput due to me
+using Samsung consumer SSDs. I shipped Arend a few enterprise SAS SSDs before, but he hasn't gotten
+around to deploying them yet. More importantly, the AM3 hypervisor runs FrysIX routeserver, LibreNMS
+and IXPManager.
+
+After the Qupra gig, Arend made his way to NIKHEF where he installed the FrysIX patch for FreeIX
+Remote, directly into the VPP router `nlams0.net.free-ix.net`. That router now has LSIX, SpeedIX,
+and FrysIX connected. I spend some time bringing FreeIX Remote AS50869 into quarantine and then into
+the production VLAN. That's a benefit of running the IXP: I get to expedite my own connections :)
+
+Now that the FreeIX Remote router is connected to FrysIX, I allocate a private VLAN between it and
+IPng's infrastructure. This allows me to create a VPWS (L2VPN, Ethernet over MPLS) on IPng's MPLS
+switches `msw0.nlams0` and `msw1.chrma0` from this router in Amsterdam to the one I already installed
+in Zurich. iBGP comes up, and there are now three routers in play (`nlams0`, `chrma0`, and
+`grskg0`), and amongst them, they know about 207K IPv4 prefixes and 64.7K IPv6 prefixes, and all of
+them can be reached via direct or routeserver peering. How cool is that?
+
+
+```
+pim@nlams0:~$ birdc show route count
+BIRD v2.15.1-4-g280daed5-x ready.
+800934 of 800934 routes for 207438 networks in table master4
+449754 of 449754 routes for 64696 networks in table master6
+1501107 of 1501107 routes for 500369 networks in table t_roa4
+364077 of 364077 routes for 121359 networks in table t_roa6
+Total: 3115872 of 3115872 routes for 893862 networks in 4 tables
+```
+
+In the evening I send a maintenance announcement out to FrysIX members: in the night of Wednesday to
+Thursday of this week, I will move the routeserver RS2 and the IXPManager over to the hypervisor
+at Qupra, which now sports a 10G connection to the FrysIX peering switch there. I have plumbed the
+management VLAN 264 and the Quarantine 2605 and the Peering LAN 2604 through to the hypervisor.
+
+I practice by moving `nms.frys-ix.net` over - this is a non-intrusive change. Using ZFS block device
+replication, I can pump over the boot disk with about 110MB/s, because the hypervisor itself has
+"only" a one gigabit connection. I boot the VM, and it comes up cleanly. Nice. I spend a few hours
+preparing the move of the other two machines (RS2 and IXPManager), which are service impacting. But
+I can start by making a snapshot of the block devices, copy their data over ahead of time, and then
+copy a final snapshot incrementally.
+
+Today was a good day for FrysIX :)