This project was started by Bradley Hook in 2023 and first published in 2024.
The goal of the project is to produce complete, working environments that feature high-availability solutions from open-source software. The project grew out of a real-world implementation and the need to document the solution for future administrators. It should be considered to be in an "alpha testing" state unless and until a future status is published. The author created this lab after encountering documentation and examples that were scattered and not uniform or compatible with each other. This brings everything together in one demo.
To use the lab, you will need a very basic KVM setup with virt-install and three bridged networks in your environment named "br0", "br1", and "br2".
Downloading the configurations and running "sudo ./build.sh" will attempt to build a fully functional replica of the lab environment. The scripts currently expect a copy of the Ubuntu Server 22.04.3 LTS ISO to be present in the same directory as the build script.
Note that all published files should be relying heavily on RFC-designated TESTNET addresses, which are NOT routable. Future iterations of the project may have scripts that facilitate using real addresses without having to hand- edit several files.
This is a lab, and so several things are insecure unless modified.
Things this project does so far:
- It builds Ubuntu autoinstall images. These images can be written to a USB drive and used to do an automated installation of a system. In this project, they are used to completely automate the installation of multiple instances.
- It runs virt-install to build multiple instances of Ubuntu Linux.
- It creates a working deployment of keepalived using VRRPv3 with strict RFC compliance and VMAC (a.k.a. macvlan) enabled. The failover target is 0.35 seconds. NOTE: a workaround was required due to a bug in either the Linux Kernel or Keepalived itself.
- It creates a working deployment of Kea-DHCP server (currently, only for IPv4).
- It creates a working deployment of conntrackd to facilitate graceful failover while preserving stateful connections.
Future goals include building all critical network services, including name servers, time servers, logging servers, network monitoring servers, and various other components.
The scripts are fairly simple and straight-forward. Read them and look around to see how things work together to build a working environment.