[AusNOG] Small box for wanem

[Ian Henderson]

On 5 Feb 2019, at 2:45 pm, Ian Henderson <ianh at ianh.net.au> wrote:

> two separate emulation 'sessions' at once). Anybody got any other
> suggestions/products that have worked well? Doesn't need to be super
> hardcore, it'll definitely be FOSS based.

Hi folks,

Got some great responses on and off list, thanks all. Ended up buying a Qotom Q555G6 for about $600 AUD off Aliexpress - 7th gen Core i5 2.6Ghz, 8G RAM, 64G M2, Wifi, 6x Intel I211 NICs. The build quality is great, the box is small enough to fit in my backpack, its fanless but doesn’t run very hot, its all in one - only needs the box and a power brick compared to a pi with a bunch of different dongles. My only quality concern is the power supply, but worst case its a 12V 5amp DC barrel connector, can just replace it from Jaycar.

"Doesn’t need to be super hardcore” got thrown out the window - the machine is far more grunty than the original requirement called for, but I really appreciate the flexibility of an entire Linux machine I can do effectively any tomfoolery with. Its even got enough steam to run a few simple VMs, I could run up some simple GNS3 topologies. 

I tested throughput by creating three bridges of two NICs each and cabling them together in a chain, then using iperf on external machines averaging about 940Mbit (so aggregate of about 5Gbit bidirectional). With NIC offload disabled the CPU was still doing absolutely nothing. 

> While I'm on the topic, is wanem still the best choice for
> throughput/latency/jitter/loss/etc simulation?

Decided against using wanem. While its a wonderfully simple setup, I didn’t like using a live CD image. I’ve installed Ubuntu 18.10 and will just use tc controlled by the usual handful of bash scripts.

Rgds,



- I.