Understanding UCC's network can be a bit challenging at first, but after some reading you'll find that it is actually very challenging, and give up. This article is a general overview of how it works.
Contents
Layer One
Uplink
There is a Cat 6 cable running straight up out of the Guild machine room, along the rafters and back down into the UCC machine room, terminated on a block on the North machine room wall.
murasoi:eth1 <-patch-> Gi2/2 kerosene Gi2/19 <---cat6---> Gi7/1 lard
In addition, there is a long piece of Cat 5 (that was previously the primary uplink!) running through the walls from the machine room to the Guild machine room in Cameron Hall (across from Newnigames). If you're looking for where the cable runs, it may look like a network outlet cable in one of the other student clubrooms.
murasoi:br0:eth2 <-fibre patch 10GBASE-SR-> 0/1 walnut 0/7 <-fibre patch 10GBASE-SR-> Te1/1 kerosene Gi2/1 <---cat5---> Gi7/2 lard
In the Guild machine room is a Cisco 4507R 484 watt media converter switch called Lard. This connects to the Cat5/Cat6 above and to single mode fibre, which runs into an ITS managed distribution switch located in the Science library and is imaginatively titled science-dr-01.
lard <----SMF-1000BASE-LX----> science-dr-01 <----SMF-10GBASE-LR?----> UWA-IT <-----SMF-100GBASE-LR?-----> AARNet,world
Machine Room
The machine room contains three switches and a router:
Murasoi, a GNU/Linux-based router running iptables/nftables.
Walnut, a Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 16-XG, connecting the router, other switches, and 10Gbps servers
Kerosene, a Cisco Catalyst 4506-E running IOS which has a Supervisor 6-E engine, 96 GigE ports and 2 10GE-capable X2 slots.
Curviceps, an HP ProCurve 1800-24G which has 24 GigE ports and 2 SFP slots.
These are all labeled and in the rack. There is also a patch panel for the clubroom wall-ports at the bottom of the right-most rack beneath kerosene.
Clubroom
There is Cat5 cabling run from a patch panel at the bottom of the rack to a number of wall ports throughout the room. Where not enough wall ports are available, there are small 5-port unmanaged switches used to attach more devices to the network.
The wireless network is also available in the clubroom.
Layer Two
Internal VLANs
UCC uses seven VLANs internally for various purposes:
- VLAN 1: Network and server management
- VLAN 2: Machine room network
- VLAN 3: Clubroom network
- VLAN 4: Member VM network
- VLAN 5: Loft network (used for LANs)
- VLAN 6: Authenticated wireless network
VLAN 7: IoT device network (wired & wireless)
VLAN 8: Untrusted wireless network. (deprecated)
VLAN 209: UWAES / E-sports network (wired & wireless)
- VLAN 999: Used as a dummy/blackhole VLAN on some switches. Do not trunk
External VLANs
University IT trunks the following VLAN to us:
- VLAN 13: Our main uplink, provides us our internet connection and address space
Layer Three
Layer three at UCC is reasonably straightforward these days. A brief summary:
Subnets
There are a number of IP ranges used at UCC for various things:
- 130.95.13.0/24 is the public address space for our AARNet connection. This range is routed to us via VLAN 13.
- 130.95.13.0/26 is the machine room address range, internally routed on VLAN 2.
- 130.95.13.64/26 is the clubroom address range, internally routed on VLAN 3.
- 130.95.13.128/26 is the member VM address range, internally routed on VLAN 4.
- 192.168.2.0/24 is the management VLAN IP range. This is not allocated to us by UWA and not routed outside UCC.
- 192.168.4.0/24 is the private subnet carrying traffic between Murasoi and the 4G modem.
- 192.168.5.0/24 is the subnet for the "4G backup" Wireguard tunnel between UCC and AWS.
192.168.9.0/24 is the Virtual UCC (VUCC) network (ask [FVP]), routable via vucc0.ucc.asn.au (130.95.13.35)
192.168.11.0/24 is the subnet for the "proxy" Wireguard links between UCC and BinaryLane.
- 192.168.13.0/24 is allocated to us by UWA and routed on VLAN 13.
- 192.168.13.0/25 is the uplink network from Murasoi to UWA.
- 192.168.13.128/25 is the former range for machines colocated in Arts.
- Currently unused.
- 192.168.16.0/22 is the authenticated UCC clients range
192.168.16.0/24 is the UCC wifi range
- 192.168.18.0/24 is the IPsec VPN client range
- 192.168.19.0/24 is the OpenVPN client range
- 192.168.20.0/22 is the untrusted / unauthenticated UCC range
192.168.20.0/24 is the new Loft range
- 192.168.22.0/24 is the IoT range
- 172.26.42.0/24 is for 'untrusted client machines' and is allocated to us by UWA and routed to us via VLAN 13. There is some history here, but these addresses are not routed outside the Uni. This subnet may be NATted to public IPs for external access.
- Currently unused.
- 172.31.0.0/16 is for Docker bridge networks on hosts
Addressing scheme
Most of UCC's subnets use DHCP to assign addresses based on MAC address. Further details can be found at Network/Services#DHCP.
Routing and Firewall
Murasoi, the GNU/Linux router, is a beast of burden. See Network/Firewall for further information on Layer 3 routing and firewalling configuration.
IPv6
UCC has 2405:3C00:5200:100::/58 (which is :100:: to :13f:: inclusive; in other words, 64 networks).
This is an unusually small CIDR block. RFC-6177 recommends that small end sites - such as a home user with devices in the "dozens or less" - should be allocated a /56 block (256 networks).
This is advertised by radvd on Murasoi which most machines autoconfigure from, however some machines have statically assigned addresses. There is an IPv6 firewall that matches our IPv4 firewall very closely.
Many machine room systems have IPv6 address, which are statically assigned. There is no reverse DNS delegation at this stage, so ...ip6.arpa. reverse DNS is UCC-only.
Monnik's DNS record doesn't have an AAAA record, because we are scared of this breaking Things(tm).
IPv6 is routed to 2405:3C00:10:4::1 from Murasoi.
Subnets
- 2405:3C00:10:4::2/64 uplink (equivalent to 192.168.13.2, UWA VLAN 13)
- 2405:3C00:5200:100::/64 machine room (VLAN 2)
- 2405:3C00:5200:101::/64 clubroom (VLAN 3)
- 2405:3C00:5200:102::/64 member VMs (VLAN 4)
- 2405:3C00:5200:103::/64 loft (VLAN 5)
- 2405:3C00:5200:104::/64 wireless (VLAN 6)
- 2405:3C00:5200:105::/64 IoT (VLAN 7)
2405:3C00:5200:106::/64 public wireless (VLAN 8)
- 2405:3C00:5200:120::/120 IPsec VPN
- 2405:3c00:5200:121::/64 OpenVPN
- 2405:3c00:5200:9100::/64 VUCC "Virtual UCC" IP range (note: not technically owned by UCC and hence not routable from the Internet)
Multicast
UWA runs multicast in sparse PIM mode, and Murasoi runs pimd as noted here. Make sure pimd is only listening once per interface, otherwise things won't work quite right.
Higher Layers
Higher layer configuration at UCC has changed significantly since TheCloudflarening. See that new page for more details.
Monitoring
There are various monitoring packages installed, links to which can be found on MissionControl.