Tag: VRFs

MPLS Lab – Playing with static LSPs and VRFs on Linux

At DENOG13 I held a workshop Fun with PBR, VRFs and NetNS on Linux (in German) where I showcased forwarding IP packets within a VRF via static MPLS LSPs. I’ve been asked to publish the configuration for this lab, so here we are 🙂

Consider the following topology consisting of a core ring build with 5 routers, a border router (br-01) connected to core router E (cr-E) as well as to the Internet. All routers take part of OSPF area 0 and run iBGP with br-01 as the route reflector which is providing a default route. This is the same setup used for most of the FrOSCon Network Track.

Topology of MPLS lab
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OpenVPN and VRFs

Using VRFs on Linux enables a whole new set of network setups.

As described in the previous post about VRFs on Linux, VRFs allow to isolate different interfaces at layer 3. In the Freifunk Hochstift network we chose to consider the main or default VRF as the internal network and move any internet facing interfaces into an external VRF. Following this concept allows, to safely contain traffic within the internal network and only at designated border routers leak eligible traffic into the internet.

In an distributed environment like the Freifunk Hochstift network, it is inevitable to connect different islands using VPN tunnels over the Internet. This could be done by the means of GRE tunnels as shown in the previous article about the border routers, or by means of encrypted VPNs like OpenVPN, IPsec or Wireguard. As the old infrastructure quite heavily relied on OpenVPN tunnels, and they worked quite well, the new setup should keep this building block in place.

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