Since I am moving abroad soon (in 8 days), I need to put my server in a shipping container, and send it on a long voyage. That means no self-hosted Wordpress for about 3 months. With this deadline, I was forced to either move to a VPS somewhere (and pay for it), or check out Jekyll/Hugo/Ghost/whatever - the blogging platforms the cool kids are using. This is what I used to do it. You are reading the results, assuming it’s not like 2025 and I’ve moved to something else.

EVE-NG rules. As far as network simulation software goes, it’s the best.

When studying or otherwise, EVE-NG is the way I prefer to try things out. One thing that happens, however, when using virtualised networks, is you obscure some underlaying things - one of them being MTU. In a previous post, I went through how the base OS that EVE-NG runs on virtualises the links between routers and switches, here I will show a way to boost the MTU these virtual network links use, so that we can throw proper jumbos across the network.

In this topology, I have 2 routers, connected with dual Ethernet links, configured in a LAG. This doesn’t affect MTU at all, I just thought I’d mention it so it’s not confusing.

The link between these routers (ae0) is set to a layer-2 MTU of 9192, which is the maximum for the platform (Juniper vSRX 3.0). This means that we should be able to send an IP packet (like a ping) of over 9000 bytes.. And yet - we can’t:

Dell has removed the ability of 11th Gen servers to download BIOS updates from ftp.dell.com - damn. This is a problem if you care about security, but then I guess if you cared that much you’d be using a newer (read: supported) server. Unlike me, the cheapskate.

So - using Dell’s Lifecycle Controller (press F10 when rebooting) - we can mount an ISO image from Dell with all the nice updates bundled in. This is very handy.

EVE-NG is a really neat way to virtualise networking stuff - routers, switches, load balancers etc.. I’m not going to harp on about it. However, when you start to run some more demanding labs (like the JNCIE/CCIE labs) - you might want to start running it on a server of your own (or that you rent from a bare-metal server provider in the cloud).

You’re a network engineer, or at least a wannabe one. You know how to stick a BGP peering on a thing or make a devastating broadcast storm - but do you know enough about Linux networking to save the president set up EVE-NG in your own LAN and maybe build a simple lab topology? Well.. If not, you can follow along with my garbled process below!

If you are a cheapskate, and want to host WordPress yourself, on a Raspberry Pi sitting on your bookshelf - then good for you (me?). What you might find, when installing WordPress on your own LAMP box, is that installing plugins/themes etc requires an FTP account - credentials WordPress asks you for. This isn’t ideal, as in my self-hosted case I don’t have a Linux ‘user’ specifically for my WordPress instance, and I can’t figure out the arcane magic required to set up a specific FTP user that also shares access with my /var/www/whatever.com directories, messing with groups and permissions and whatnot..