Codatory

© CBS

My brain has become kind of an amorphous blob of mush recently and I though I needed to change things up a bit. Apparently I’m not one of those people who can productively code for 10+ hours a day. (What did you think I did after work?) Anyway, I wanted to get back to my roots as a network admin and do something different so I decided to pick up a few inexpensive MicroTik routers and learn some advanced routing.

Anyway, while waiting for the gear to arrive I decided to watch this excellent training video and then decided I needed to design a “network” to route. The network I designed loosely resembles a real datacenter style network but much smaller. In fact, small enough to fit on my desk. Like a miniature train set.

Anyway, here’s the plan. I’m going to configure the routers first and then I’m going to try and get them to distribute their routes via RIP, then OSPF, then BGP. I’ll try configuring some HA stuff and testing what happens in various situations and maybe later on even play with VRRP. Here’s a diagram of the network topology I’m going to use first.

You might think it odd that I decided to handle all of my “peering” on a switch instead of with routers, but really this is pretty common. Since all those routers are “ISP” routers, they can be trusted to some degree so the additional flexibility and performance of using a switch should be nice. For example, to upgrade the TRANSIT router or to increase capacity, another one can simply be added to the switch and the full bandwidth becomes available to the mesh. Also, it allows me to plug one cable into my computer and run WinBox to manage all these things via MAC ;-)

Oh, and the 192.168.x.x addresses are “customer” addresses. That’s just so I’ll have something to ping and traceroute to.