Linux Routing is becoming a thing with me. I cant decide if the motivation is the extreme cost of dedicated hardware, or the knowledge that with a little effort you can make a free/cheap thing into a giant killer. David and Goliath is a fun story I guess.

VPP has been on my radar now for a few years. I have tried and failed a few times to get it into production typically on the internet edge of a datacentre in place of something expensive like a Cisco ASR or a Juniper MX.

Last year I wrote extensively about my experience with deploying VyOS to support my new uber fast internet connection.

I learned a lot in the process, and for this past year it has mostly worked fine. I am one of those people that can’t leave things alone however, and I was always tinkering with the setup. The VyOS box itself was happily communicating at 10G, but I would find the internal LAN would get choked up a lot and rarely hit 1G even with extreme threading (say 50-60 conns). I got grumpy about this for no reason and started to tinker. TL:DR - This was a mistake…

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. Noice.

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. If you cant observe let alone react to a microburst, you’re pretty much blindfolded in a modern DC network setting.