Hello and welcome!

You now find yourself on a blog created by a CCNP R&S and Fortinet NSE7 networking nerd who write about topics I find interesting in the networking world.

My goal is to give the reader easily digestible explanations of various IT topics, new or old. As my interests cover Networking, Automation, Programming and more I hope to bring a variery of interesting articles for the IT-savvy reader.

Latest posts:


BGP communities for route filtering

Published 2026-08-28

I'd like to share a BGP route filtering design I keep coming back to in my work as a network engineer. It's based on BGP communities, a tool that is widely used by Internet Service...

Read Article


Optimizing blog GeoIP DB

Published 2026-03-23

As part of migrating my blog from Python to Go, I wanted to gather anonymized statistics about which countries my visitors were coming from. This "small" feature ended up requiring a bit of optimization due...

Read Article


Python vs Go

Published 2026-03-14

2025 was the year I moved from Python to Go. I was developing an internal automation tool for work and Python was my language of choice. As it was reaching 10,000 lines of code I...

Read Article


Loopback Generator

Published 2025-05-29

I have been teaching myself Golang over the last year or so. A big part of my learning has been through a peronal project I call Gollenet where I build a model of a "large"...

Read Article


Ansible

Published 2025-05-24

I recently led a workshop to help my network engineer colleagues get started with Ansible. It's written as a handholding start-from-zero guide that I shared as a git-repo on Github. The workshop contain eight chapters....

Read Article


Firewall Cluster and EVPN

Published 2024-06-09

This article will cover three interesting problems I faced when deploying a Fortigate Firewall (FW) cluster in a VXLAN EVPN (MLAG) datacenter topology. The customer had requested that each FW member was to be deployed...

Read Article


A case against Active-Active firewall clusters

Published 2023-11-27

Over the years, I have seen more and more posts on the Internet from network engineers asking whether their new network design should use a firewall cluster that is Active-Passive (A-P) or Active-Active (A-A). My...

Read Article


EVPN Multihoming - MLAG vs ESI

Published 2023-02-19

This article will be comparing MLAG and ESI for EVPN multihoming. Multihoming is the practice of connecting a device to multiple points in the network. For example, a server may connect to two switches for...

Read Article


VXLAN Anycast Gateway

Published 2023-01-27

One of the strengths of VXLAN is that you can distribute the default gateway IP-address across multiple nodes for active-active forwarding. This is a massive leap forward when compared to active-passive HSRP and VRRP-based solutions...

Read Article


VXLAN L2VPN

Published 2023-01-13

This article will cover the main feature and selling point of VXLAN, tunneling Ethernet frames over a routed network to create L2VPN topologies. I will focus on Arista vEOS in my lab topology as it...

Read Article


Copyright 2021-2026, Emil Boklund.
All Rights Reserved.