#packetfence — Public Fediverse posts

Having a history with #packetfence as our radius server and am currently doing a #proofofconcept with the help of of #aruba with their #clearpass product, just quietly from my initial impressions... packetfence seems easier to configure and use

#sysadmin #networking #nac #radius #authentication #opensource

@projectdp I really enjoyed the #SDN stuff, and using #OpenvSwitch. It was neat to learn, and think about how it could all be utilized with something like #PacketFence.

Hopefully you enjoy the Gluu stuff. I think it's great!

I think the biggest issue with maintenance, was that the systems generally sat idle or barely utilized, unless I was playing with something super complex. So, running them mostly idle, and then having a high performance enterprise class drive fail... well, it was $300-400 to replace a relatively small drive. But, they were 15k spinny drives rated for datacenter.

I had a power supply fail, and so replacing those were expensive. Fiber card failures, etc. General things that just fail from age. Which would be fine if I was utilizing it for something big. But, just having it sit there, running a windows domain with 1 or 2 users, full exchange setup, etc... neat, but not worth the overall cost.

Noise, heat, and all that wasn't too bad, because it all sits in a dedicated full server rack in the garage. Nice 2x 10Gbps fiber to the rack from main network stack.

If I was going to do a lab now, I'd probably utilize something similar to a NUC. Something relatively small / lower power, but can be loaded up with 128GB RAM minimum, and an okay processor. This would be more than enough for testing things.

These days, most of my lab work is done via a #digitalocean instance. Relatively cheap for what it is. Let's me explore, have a routable IP, etc. Then, I can shut it down if I want.

Optimally, maybe a small NUC + DO would be a good setup.