Despite my blogs being dead since February , I have been active on my networking journey. COVID-19 has forced millions to work from home including myself. The home networks importance has come to the forefront.

Since everyone started working from home a few weeks ago. There was reports from users with video and audio call quality issues. Prior to the events, I had ordered additional Access Points to expand the network. My internal monitoring (librenms) showed my firewall CPU utilization over 85% daily. I reviewed the Ubiquiti controller and USG (3P) logs and noticed that the firewall was not forwarding in hardware and I could not switch it back on. I noticed the Beta IPS/IDS was enabled. Although the service should still allow 85Mbps it disabled hardware offload. I disabled the feature and re-enabled hardware offload. Users have reported improve performance.

As a result of the issues, It became clear my monitoring needs to improve. Since the issues were related to voice quality issues , I wanted to get a better idea on the latency of my network. Smokeping is a latency monitor that I installed as part of my librenms build. The chart before is showing some smoke I will need to review over the coming days.

I am continuing my studying as well which albeit is less exciting sometime is equally important. IPv6 has been the latest topic. Recently a customer tasked me with deploying v6 to an existing site. I spent time reviewing v6 material; watching videos on topics as a primer for material but reading the RFCs allow for my own interpretation of the technology. RFC 2460 & RFC 4861 and 4862 have been worthwhile reads. Yesterday while scrolling through my Twitter feed , Ethan Banks over at the Packet Pushers posted a Webinar for an ARIN IPv6 course this week. I am looking forward to this Webinar.