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Creating an autonomous system for fun and profit (2017)

The thoughts and projects of an engineer who likes to convert solder, firmware, and wire into all sorts of different forms of entertainment.

My business license cost me the effort to come up with a kick-ass company name and about $33/year, and I’ve never even gotten around to doing anything fancy like incorporating it, so it’s really just a piece of paper that hangs in my hallway and allows me to file 1099-MISC forms on my tax returns within the city of Sunnyvale, CA. Network engineers love to hate their 6500s because they’re so old, but its relatively limited “only” 30 million packets per second throughput is plenty for an autonomous system that fits in a single rack, and its age means I was able to pick up a 6506 configured with dual supervisors and three (3!) The 6506 probably deserves blog posts of its own, but the main thing is that low end configurations of it like this are cheap on eBay, with the one disadvantage that they don’t come with a supervisor card with enough memory to handle a full Internet table.

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