Peplink as home gateway/firewall!
I’m a big fan of routers and firewalls, love the idea of running pfSense back in the days, before m0n0wall/pfSense, I used to run a custom FreeBSD firewall!!
Do you remember m0n0wall ??
Yes, the father of pfSense and some may say that m0n0wall is the father of opnSense!
Since a year ago, I decided in a branded router/firewall for the home, just because one feature. Yes, only one feature made me buy this Peplink Balance 20X.
I just decided that Proxmox is not challenging enough and interesting enough to keep me trying stuff and investing learning time in it. Yeah, a lot of Proxmox lovers will hate me for saying that but the time for a new platform/way to do things is among us, and maybe you already notice, I don’t do VMware stuff anymore.
I just want to run Kubernetes, a lot of Kubernetes clusters for testing solutions like Cilium and others, my real issue with Proxmox is the integration with automation tools like Terraform (there is not an official module for it) and the Storage plugins for consuming Proxmox storage on Kubernetes is terrible. I always liked Harvester and the latest integration into the downstream cluster running on Harvester and deployed with Rancher is awesome!
So, this is the plan.
Currently running a 3-node Proxmox cluster with Ceph and a few NVME and Intel SSD drives that are good enough for decent storage performance. I will remove 2 nodes from that cluster and convert them to Harvester, now there is support for a 2-node Cluster + Witness node. The witness node will run on the stand-alone Proxmox (Harvester doesn’t have a USB pass-through yet and I run unRAID on that host).
The 2 HP z440 will be my new 2-node Harvester cluster.
This machine will have 4 drives, 2 NVME, and 2 Intel SSD, in the RAM area, there will be 256GB of RAM available and enough CPU to run at least 3 or 4 RKE2 clusters for testing and production stuff.
I’ll update on the progress…
At this point, we know how to install Cilium and create a BGP peering with our routers. Now we need to let the outside world reach our Kubernetes apps.
If you don’t have the KinD cluster with Cilium go to https://arielantigua.com/weblog/2024/07/cilium-bgp-lab-locally/
When using Cilium you can reach an application using the Pod IP address or using a LoadBalance IP assigned to a Service. In the previous article we only advertised the Pod Address to our BGP neighbors, lets add more stuff so we can be close to a real deployment.
If you already have cloned the repo, go and do a pull so you can get the new config files and other stuff in the Makefile, or better yet, go and do a new clone of the repo and start from scratch, that’s the idea of the repo!
Maybe you already know about Cilium, You don’t?
Go read https://docs.cilium.io/en/stable/overview/intro/ and come back !!
Hello again!
So now you want to learn about Cilium BGP functionality, for me this is one of the most exciting features of Cilium, maybe the reason is the addiction that I already have for BGP, who knows (AS207036). Back to the point, with Cilium you can establish a BGP session with your routers (Tor, border, or core, you decide.) and announce PodCIDR or LoadBalance for services.
For this learning exercise, we will use Kind and other tools to run a K8s cluster locally on any Linux (Windows or MacOS) machine. There is a lot of info on the internet on how to get Kind up and running and even how to install Cilium, I decided to build a collection of Cilium Labs (ciliumlabs) to speed up the process of getting a Cilium testing environment up and running.
First, go and clone the repo, all the information is on the README of each lab type, in this case, bgp/README.md is the one with the steps to get this ready, but we first need to install the prereqs. The prerequisites are listed in the main README file. In my environment, all this is met so I can proceed with the lab creation.
This is my opinion about this platform.
A few weeks ago, Platform9 announced a Hands-on-Lab for their KubeVirt implementation, and after using Harvester for running VMs mainly for deploying Rancher RKE clusters, I got my hands on this platform and the differences are huge.
First, Platform9 keeps its offering very close to the upstream project, what does this mean, it looks like you installed KubeVirt manually in your K8s cluster, this is good. The good thing about it is that you are more familiar with the solution and when the time to move to another KubeVirt offering comes, the changes will be minimal.