Networks, clusters
and a farm full of influencers

Field notes from a network engineer’s home lab.
Cheat sheets I actually use, the infrastructure they run on, and one creative detour.

Browse the KnowledgeBase Tour the home lab Networking Toolbox

Running on 3 Proxmox hosts, a 3-node K3s cluster and a TrueNAS

Cheat sheets & tools

IPv4 Subnet Calculator Network, broadcast, host range, wildcard and binary for any IPv4 prefix, plus a subnet splitter. Runs in your browser.
Route Summarisation Paste a list of IPv4 prefixes and get the smallest set of aggregates that covers them exactly, or one covering supernet.
BGP Cheat Sheet Neighbours, attributes, filtering and the verification commands.
Bandwidth & Transfer Time How long a file takes at a given link speed, or what speed you need to finish in time, with protocol overhead and bits-vs-bytes handled for you.
OSPF Cheat Sheet Areas, LSA types, timers, network types and show commands.
Throughput & Latency Bandwidth-delay product, the TCP window a single stream needs, the throughput a given window can reach, and packets per second at line rate.
OpenSSL Cheat Sheet Generate, inspect and convert keys and certificates with OpenSSL.
Cisco Type 7 Decoder Decode (or encode) Cisco IOS type 7 passwords from a config line, and a reminder of why they should be type 8 or 9.
ISE Cheat Sheet The ISE settings and commands worth remembering.
DHCP Option 43 Generator Vendor-specific option 43 for wireless controller discovery: Cisco WLC, Aruba, Ruckus ZoneDirector/SmartZone, UniFi, custom; output for IOS, Junos, ISC, Windows, MikroTik, FortiGate.
Hugo Cheat Sheet Running, writing and deploying this site: Hugo commands, the Hextra module, front matter, shortcodes, and the troubleshooting I keep repeating.
VLAN & Trunk Cheat Sheet VLANs, access and trunk ports, native VLAN, spanning tree and the show commands, for Cisco IOS and Junos side by side.
Docker Cheat Sheet Everyday docker and docker compose commands: images, containers, volumes, networks, logs and clean-up.

Kubernetes

K3s and RKE2 cluster builds, HA with embedded etcd, Longhorn storage, Traefik ingress.

Routing

BGP and OSPF cheat sheets, a dual-homed BGP design with OSPF underneath, and the Networking Toolbox for the arithmetic.

Security

Site-to-site VPN between UniFi and FortiGate, Cisco ISE notes, OpenSSL certificate recipes.

The home lab

Proxmox, K3s, TrueNAS and UniFi: the design, what it runs, and what it costs versus the cloud.

Projects

Side projects beyond the lab, starting with The Hay-List: six farm animals, six niches, one farm, built with AI.

About me

Network engineer working with Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet and Palo Alto. Say hi on GitHub or LinkedIn.

Networks, clustersand a farm full of influencers