Networking

Two NICs, one subnet. Seems fine. It isn’t. I frequently run into this on Linux servers, PTP Grandmaster clocks, telemetry acquisition and analysis servers, industrial controllers and other appliances where Linux is running under the hood whether the vendor advertises it or not. Most of them cover this limitation somewhere in their published documentation. It is worth reading before you plug in the second cable. The symptoms are always the same: traffic arrives on one interface, replies leave on another, sessions drop for no apparent reason, and nothing in the logs explains it. ...

I inherited a set of Ubuntu servers that were provisioned outside of our normal provisioning and configuration methods of Foreman and Ansible, talking to Windows DHCP servers that use DHCP Option 81 for dynamic DNS registration. The problem was that some servers were getting their DNS A records registered correctly and some were not. The inconsistency was problematic, and the more I dug into it, the worse it got. This is the story of chasing that inconsistency, finding a workaround, realising the workaround was unnecessary, and ending up with a PR open against systemd upstream to fix a man page that has been inconsistent and ambiguous for years. ...