Weird. In my first hugo post just two days ago I speculated it would take me weeks to get this content off blogger and into hugo. It took me three evenings. All the DNS has been switched and we are now fully on hugo with a gitops workflow, previews on a branch push and I was even able to retain the old URL paths as an alias, so anyone googling my stupid opinions can still read them on the new or the old path.

Over the past year or so I found myself returning to my own blog to remind myself how I did things in VyOS and how I configured this or that thing or whatever. Each time I sort of hated the fact the theme was crap. Blogger themes are so dated, they remind me a little of Geocities now. I know that dates me somewhat too, but anyways. They suck and brosing for something that isn’t terrible seems more and more futile.

So it turns out that if you want metrics from VyOS, your two options are SNMP or Telegraf (towards InfluxDB). SNMP is one of those things that has been around so long, you think its good, but really, its trash. Its a 1990s technology that is mostly singlethreaded and provides you very very fuzzy numbers. 5 min averages are not that useful in situations like today where clients plausibly have access to gigabit+ grades of connectivity.

Updated Jul 2022: Following an exchange it was clear to me that my explaination around the IPv6-PD usage was not very good, so I updated this section to clarify the prefix usage. I also feel that there is a gap here where the VyOS config should be able to pool the PD assignment, instead of me assigning it somewhere stupid like I did here. As I discussed in my 10/25Gbit internet at home , I recently moved away from an appliance based router at home, to instead use a fancy(ish) NIC passed through directly to a VM.

When I first arrived in Switzerland in 2017, aside from the clean air, beautiful countryside, and the promise of a highly paid job with which to support my family, I was transfixed by something that seemed completely alien to me - Fibre to the Home. Yes, I am a nerd, and Yes somewhat parallel to a comfortable living space, and good local schools, I made sure each house viewing included a search for an OTO.

During the Go Essential Training course on LinkedIn, the instructor sets up a problem for you to solve. The solution is in the next slide of the course, and mine was ever so slightly different anyways, so I doubt that this needs to come with a spoiler alert, but anyways… An even-ended number is one that starts and ends with the same digit. That is to say 1, 11, 121, and 10103921 are all even ended numbers as they all start and end with the same digit.

Now that I have I have set up a sort of a learning plan to plug some gaps in my knowledge that I always wanted to plug, but didn’t have the time to do properly. Mindful that I have an opportunity for learning without external influences on my time, but also that my Daughter only has Kindergarten until lunchtime every day, I really only get the morning before the family time kicks in.

Two weeks ago I was made redundant. COVID and “shifting business priorities” meant a re-org of my department and for whatever reason, that is that. Over the last year or so I had assumed this day might come and the question I had internally was if I would jump or if I would be pushed. Since I was slap bang in the middle of a key project, I had assumed I might still have 9-12 months or so left to close that out.

Part 5: Deviations So we can talk to the device, and we can use candidate configs to stage and then apply configs in aggregate, but we still can’t make a CSR1000v take a simple openconfig IP address. At the beginning I deliberately called out I wanted to use generic models, and avoid the deviations. This is because the python model binding i then generate only works on that vendor’s box now.

Part 4: Config stores As we head down this rabbit hole, we start to get ever closer to something useful, but ever more deep into the weeds of NETCONF/YANG. For the uninitiated, config stores are a place where you can put config chunks either singularly, or in aggregate over a series of netconf pushes, to generate a new config that you will apply in one hit. In the SP world you might want to setup some interfaces, some BGP and then some overlay like an MPLS service.