Yes, I have been away for a while. No I did not do anything cool. Anyway, it’s time to try this thing again-ish, since I’ve never used Containerlab before.
TL;DR - I got obliterated on a job interview and realized I have fallen behind on some skills I used to consider core, so time to level the fuck up and obliterate the interview next time.
Data Center networking is a bit different from what I expected, (yeah shocker, a large chunk of how the internet works which has been evolving while I ignored it has advanced into something I don’t recognize, how could this be?
I’ve already done a deployment of Containerlab and built out 2 labs (with a little help from my artificial intelligence friends) so I have some stuff to keep the blog rolling for at least a couple more posts before I disappear into Timberborn, ZeroCompany or WoW:Forever again.
The next post will be about setting up the environment and pulling and/or building some containers to run the labs with. I am starting with FRR and SONiC so no one has to get a job that has access to proprietary operating systems or images. I’ll use Alpine or a Kali Linux container with a small subset of Kali tooling for the end points, and I’m having some fun playing with Edgeshark for monitoring traffic. I’ll eventually incorporate Zeek and Suricata, and maybe play around with a few different SIEM type tools so we can see how detection engineering and incident response might play out, and something like Caprica for firewall configuration management.. but that means we need more firewall types, so that will wait for a bit.
If you want to play along at home, I’m starting with a clean install of Ubuntu26.04 LTS with DockerCE and Docker Compose.
If you are reading this, I guess that means I remembered how to deploy an update using Hugo. If you aren’t reading this, then I guess I’m still working on it. 🤷