Category: Network design

VRRP on Linux. Use Keepalived for HA and load balancing.

VRRP – Virtual Redundancy Routing Protocol in Linux systems could be implemented with keepalived. Also, keepalived could be used to implement High Availability (active/passive) or load balancing (active/active). Four aspects need to be configured on a VRRP HA server: keepalived, iptables, sysctl and the service itself (rsyslog in this case). Sysctl. The host’s kernel needs […]

Case: revew firewall configuration

Case: Customer concerns about firewall configuration. Firewall implemented on Linux server. Firewall includes NAT. Discovery: During review of firewall configuration I discovered following – total number of lines in configuration are ~5500. Some rules grouped in groups (chains). Some groups have no rules in them. Many rules never have had traffic passing through them. Advice […]

How to configure PAT on Mikrotik (RouterOS)

Download WinBox and connect to Mikrotik. Select “IP” – > “Firewall”. Select NAT. Click on plus and select “Chain” -> “dsnat”. Enter dst.address – this is tipically public IP address of Mikrotik router. Enter protocol type (for HTTP this is “tcp”). Enter dst.port – port, what will be NAT-ed. Click “Atcion” tab. Select “Action” -> […]

Case: Separate call-center/support team from production network and from management network

Customer have one big network with all users in same network fragment. Customer want to improve security. Problem description: All employee reside in one big network fragment and have some level of access to all corporate servers. Production and support team span acros entire building. Proposed solution: Split network in 4 fragments: servers, support, production […]

Case: improve resilency and throughput of network.

Customer have issues with LAN. Customer do not want to spend money on new switches/routeres. Bottleneck – connection between datacenter switches and distribution/access level switches. Problems description: low througput. No redundancy for access switches 1 & 2 for cases, when link from access witch to distribution switch fail. Proposed solution: increase througput between DC switches […]

Fault tolerant DNS cluster

Yep. For small companies, it might be not important, how you build/configure your DNS servers, as you might need to serve just a few queries per second or a few queries per minute. But good design is key to success if your goal is to serve thousands and thousands of queries per minute or second.Here […]