My High School banned Phones... in 2011!

 Posted on July 8, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  186 words  |  Neel Chauhan

Today I read that many schools from NYC to LA want to ban smartphones in school. Well, let me tell you that my high school, Somers High School of Somers, NY (an rural-ish but rich NYC exurb) did actually ban phones back in 2011, and when I graduated in 2015 they still did. When it comes to mobile tech, the early-to-mid-2010s were almost like the stone age. Whereas most of my peers had an iPhone on Verizon, my family chose to go with Samsung phones on Sprint. [Read More]

Taming Noise on HPE ProLiant ML-series Tower Servers

 Posted on June 13, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  156 words  |  Neel Chauhan

As mentioned earlier, my homelab server is a HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen11 which is a single-socket Intel Sapphire Rapids-based server. One problem with this server is how much noise it generates. I swear, the ML110 Gen10 was much quieter. It’s a big trouble especially since right now I’m “houseless” meaning I’m living with my brother and have my ML110 in a bedroom closet. However, with the default power settings it’s still very noisy especially when running a cluster of Tor relays. [Read More]

Bypassing Frontier Connecticut GPON 802.1X with MikroTik

 Posted on June 6, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  261 words  |  Neel Chauhan

I’ve made it back eastwards! Yay! While my family looks for NYC hosing, I’m living in Stamford, CT in my brother’s townhouse/condo. The condo has Frontier FiberOptic. But as Connecticut is a former AT&T market, unless you’re on XGS-PON which I’m not, GPON is based off AT&T Fiber with the infamous 802.1X requirement. Initially, I used a Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridge but after having performance issues, I moved the Cat6 drops to near my equipment and “bypassed” the Frontier gateway. [Read More]

Enabling Path MTU Discovery in MikroTik, or why my PPPoE/6rd was slow

 Posted on February 29, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  233 words  |  Neel Chauhan

For many years, I’ve stuck with OPNsense, first initially since until a couple of years ago I was a die-hard FreeBSD user. But more importantly, by default Linux-based firealls play poorly with CenturyLink’s 6rd. I’ve been wanting to use a MikroTik as my core router instead of OPNsense for many years, but whenever I tried, 6rd browsing was just so slow for some reason. A few days ago, I got myself a MikroTik CCR2004-16G-2S+ and intially went IPv4-only. [Read More]

A MikroTik RouterOS v7 IPv6 BGP Config

 Posted on February 25, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  373 words  |  Neel Chauhan

As my long-awaited sequel to my MikroTik RouterOS v7 BGP configuration, I will do a RouterOS v7 configuration, but this time with IPv6. The setup will have: R1 with AS1 and R2 with AS2 1::/64 that R1 will advertise 2::/64 that R2 will advertise 3::/64 for the point-to-point link between R1 and R2 3::1 for R1 and 3::2 for R2 The ether1 interface for the R1 and R2 point-to-point links The ether2 interface for the internal, to-be-advertised subnet To setup BGP, first set your IP addresses, on R1: [Read More]

An underrated ESXi/Proxmox alternative: Rocky Linux, KVM and Cockpit

 Posted on February 8, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  953 words  |  Neel Chauhan

In my homelab, I have a Rocky Linux 9 server/hypervisor. For quite a while, I’ve just used the command line to manage virtual machines. It was tricky to know which TCP port was used for VNC, and forward it to my Fedora laptop. I’ve always been dreaming about a Web UI for virtual machines, but didn’t want ESXi or Proxmox, and was pretty dissapointed when I tried SmartOS and OmniOS. One day, I was on Mastodon (or Reddit) and learned that there is a KVM virtual machine module for Cockpit. [Read More]

A Simple MikroTik RouterOS v7 BGP Config

 Posted on February 4, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  333 words  |  Neel Chauhan

While I’m not a professional network engineer at the time of writing, lately I’ve been playing with MikroTik’s CHR in EVE-NG. One thing I wanted to set up is a basic BGP configuration between two ASes. In this setup, I will assume there are two neighboring routers with eBGP. The setup will have: R1 with AS1 and R2 with AS2 1.0.0.0/24 that R1 will advertise 2.0.0.0/24 that R2 will advertise 3. [Read More]

Install Folding@home on Fedora 39 with FAHControl

 Posted on December 22, 2023  |  2 minutes  |  236 words  |  Neel Chauhan

At the present moment, my desktop is technically a “gaming PC” but really a workstation for various non-gaming tasks. It’s a Mini-ITX homebuilt PC with an Intel i9-13900F CPU and a RTX 4070. It runs Fedora 39. I’ve been wanting to run Folding@home on my main PC for a while now. I run Folding@home at my work systems, both Windows 365 and physical workstation (although I mostly WFH, yay!). One problem with using the default binaries from the Folding@home website is FAHControl is designed for Python 2. [Read More]

How to get multi-core PPPoE on your x86 router

 Posted on December 22, 2023  |  4 minutes  |  691 words  |  Neel Chauhan

One commonly-stated problem with PPPoE, especially done on x86-based routers like pfSense and OPNsense is they’re “single-threaded”. The reason why they’re single-threaded is because of how NICs are designed. These NICs know how to sort IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, but not PPP traffic. combined with both Linux and FreeBSD processing PPPoE in the thread that process packets. However, using virtualization and bridge interfaces (not PCIe passthrough), you can mitigate this issue and get real multi-threaded PPPoE. [Read More]

Want multi-threaded PPPoE in OPNsense/pfSense: Virtualize it with bridges

 Posted on November 13, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  474 words  |  Neel Chauhan

I am currently a CenturyLink Fiber customer in Seattle, WA and its well known that CenturyLink uses PPPoE. Yes, I’m aware of the migration to “Quantum Fiber” which uses DHCP, but I’ll probably move to NYC before I get shifted to Quantum and subsequently have Verizon FiOS (again), also with DHCP. My home server, a massive HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen11 with a Broadcom 10GbE OCP adapter, I virtualize OPNsense inside of Rocky Linux 9 using KVM, which is directly connected to my (hacked) CenturyLink ONT. [Read More]