It's been a while since my last post and I want to shed some light on what I've been up to and what are my plans for the future of this site. A lot of things happened in 2019 and 2020 in my professional life and the two most important ones were changing job and becoming a CCIE R&S this February (just before the lockdown). Both of these activities were the main reason why I've been silent here for so long (not to mention living through the lockdown with a toddler).
Recently I’ve been tasked to come up with a VPN solution which must support: - All major desktop and mobile OSes as clients - Clients behind NAT - Mikrotik RouterOS as a client - Site-to-site and remote access VPNs
First, I had to decide whether it will be a dedicated hardware appliance or software running on a VM. The latter was more appealing because of its flexibility and ease of deployment.
Second, I needed to choose the actual software. The following options were considered: - IPSEC implementations such as FreeSWAN, OpenSWAN or strongSWAN - OpenVPN - SoftEther
OpenVPN was chosen because of its huge user base, cross-platform client support, and extensive customization options.
This is the final entry in the series. In this post, I want to show how Ansible can be used to automate Windows VM provisioning. As always all the scripts and configurations are available at my GitHub repository.
In the first entry of this series I showed how to create VM templates using Packer. Now we can use those templates to spin up actual VMs with help of Terraform.
In this series of posts I'd like to show how to automate the process of setting up virtual infrastructure consisting of several Windows Server 2016 machines. Most articles I've come across cover the use of cloud providers (e.g. AWS) as a virtualization platform, so I decided to make a write up about my experience with VMware vSphere.