Clouded in mist

Virtualization is a cool new buzzword, but it goes beyond that, it is actually going to help me solve a few problems. Before I go any further, here’s the network topology of my setup.

I’ve a few objectives I wish to attain with this setup. Mainly,

• Learning Windows administration in depth.
• Testing Vyatta and hope to eventually use it as my primary router.
• Learning to implement more complex network setups with various routing protocols. I’ll eventually add more routers to my existing virtualized topology. Now I’m just getting the basics off the ground.
• Learning some basic Linux administration. I’m adding Ubuntu 8.04 to the pile of virtualized OS soon, I currently have it installed on my desktop via Wubi.
• Learning and deploying IPv6 as a minor objective after all the above has been satisfied.

My main home router is an old P3 450 MHz machine that’s finding new purpose in life and now runs IPCop. The router for my virtualized network runs Vyatta.

Taking advantage of Microsoft’s trial program for their server and developer products, I downloaded a copy of Windows Server 2008. The 60 day evaluation period can be extended to 240 days, and doing so is even blessed by Microsoft. One reinstallation every 240 days sound fair enough for me. This time I really really am going sit down and teach myself Active Directory. Yes, really.

In order for the newly added network to be recognized, an entry in IPCop’s routing table needed to be added. Being a SOHO router distribution, it doesn’t support any routing protocols so a static route had to be manually added. As a Linux newbie, the whole process took way longer because of a silly mistake that I made, missing out the gateway portion of the route add command. From my past experiences working on Cisco routers, adding a static path required you only to specify the destination network address, mask and either the next hop router address or outgoing interface. I hastily entered the same, specifying the outgoing interface without realizing that if a gateway is between the two networks, I’ve to use the next hop address syntax instead of just specifying the outgoing interface.

Correct:

route add -net 192.168.5.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.1.150

Wrong:

route add -net 192.168.5.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth0

This resulted in a scenario of traffic being able to reach from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.5.1, but not to the rest of the 192.168.5.0 network, which puzzled me greatly until I realized my folly.

Another silly was the result of cloning VMWare machines. The fact that cloned machines would have similar MAC addresses never crossed my mind, and that caused all kinds of havoc on its own. It was fixed by changing the MAC address in the machine configuration file (.vmx).

Aside from those issues, setting up the network was relatively easy. Vyatta took minimal configuration out of the box.

Setting up the interfaces:

set interfaces ethernet eth0 address 192.168.1.150/24
set interfaces ethernet eth1 address 192.168.5.1/24

Default routing to allow internet access:

set protocols static route 0.0.0.0/0 next-hop 192.168.1.1

Enable the ssh service:

set service ssh

In Vyatta, changes are not committed immediately after typing in every command until you explicitly tell it to, so:

commit

Done for now, more updates on this small project of mine as they come along. Oh, and I’m proud of the network diagram I drew, it’s the cleanest and neatest one I’ve ever done. Previously they were hand drawn or MS Paint jobs, this one’s done in Powerpoint.