Containers and Capabilities

I have to work with container images from time to time, and sometimes I need to do networking stuff. Of course, you want to do this as an unprivileged user. Especially when you mix and match with Docker or Kubernetes, it gets sometimes a bit tricky and a lot of people in our community including myself struggled on this part. To document it for my future-self and the ones interested – here is my scenario. Continue reading

A cookbook for a K8s playground

In my last weeks, I had to work with deployments of OpenNMS with Kubernetes. Instead of spending dollars on cloud providers for my lab, I’ve bought a beefy cheap box for my home network for less than 1.500,-€ about a year ago. It saved me probably already more than I would have spent on similar resources in the cloud for my playgrounds. It has an Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10880H CPU, 64 GB RAM, and 2 TB SSD which has enough steam to run VMware ESXi on it. Continue reading

ioquake3 in a container

Once upon a time, people had no internet access, or it was very expensive and slow. To have some fun, they spent weekends with their friends and hung out playing games over a local area network. It was so much fun it gained some interest and the space from your friends house was just too small for all the people. Parents and families went crazy and electric bills went through the roof. Continue reading

This website is not available in your country

Note to my future self. You might find yourself in a situation where you are blocked from an internet service because of your geographic location. A way to get around is using a VPN from a friend in a non-evil geographic location or using a 3rd party VPN service. Sometimes you don’t have that option right away and you need something quickly - Torbrowser for the rescue. Download and install the latest Torbrowser. Continue reading

BGP monitoring playground

Monitoring BGP can be done in various ways. First thing people want to know is if there is a way to get notifications in case a BGP peering session goes down. A pretty common way monitoring the BGP peering session state is using SNMP and the RFC1269 MIB. In OpenNMS Horizon we have the BGP session monitor which allows to track the state using the BGP peer table. The downside is, you need to configure for every peering session a monitor and this can be cumbersome and hard to maintain. Continue reading

OpenNMS Horizon, Docker, Traefik and Let's Encrypt

I work from home for over 6 years now and especially when you like networking, want to get stuff up and running and breaking it - you start looking around :) You’ve heard about k8s, k{0,3}s or Microk8s but you don’t want to use it to run your private blog and you find yourself in a spot where the benefits running stuff in containers justify the pain - this article might be something for you :) Continue reading

Quick manual Kafka OpenNMS stack

We have gathered a few ready-to-run Docker stacks in our public stack-play GitHub repository. But sometimes you need Kafka, Zookeeper and OpenNMS quickly on a baremetal deployment without Docker. Here a few quick notes how to get the bare minimum up and running. Zookeeper Install OpenJDK 11 JRE sudo apt install -y openjdk-11-jre Create a user for zookeeper sudo adduser --system --home /opt/zookeeper --disabled-login zookeeper Create a logs directory sudo mkdir /var/log/zookeeper sudo chown zookeeper:nogroup /var/log/zookeeper -R Install zookeeper Continue reading

Setting up a VMware Test environment

To test functions like importing OVA files in VMware ESXi and with vCenter the trial phase and a local deployment can be used. You need the following requirements: VMware Workstation on Windows or VMware Fusion on Mac OSX VMware Hypervisor ISO image to install the ESXi host system VMware vCenter ISO image for local deployment If you just want to learn how it works you can get a 60 days trial license registering an account on VMware. Continue reading