Nuggets

A firmware setting decides whether each ConnectX port wakes up speaking Ethernet or native InfiniBand. My cards run both at once, and the same verbs binaries push bytes over either. One mstconfig line to change your NIC's religion.

RDMA bypasses the kernel, so tcpdump captures nothing while the port counters swallow gigabytes. The NIC itself can mirror the port though, and from the host that owns the PF you can watch every byte your SR-IOV guests exchange.

Palo Alto's docs offer two Active/Active redundancy models: floating IPs or route-based with BGP. My pair runs both simultaneously, one per side, because the real question isn't which model fits your firewalls. It's what the neighbor on each interface can speak.

IPoIB gives your IB fabric an IP address so ordinary sockets code just works. On a 10G link it even matches verbs on bandwidth. The CPU counter and the latency numbers tell the real story of what that convenience costs.

Two ConnectX-6 ports that can do HDR. A DAC with 100G printed on the label. An InfiniBand link that trained at 10 gigabits. Your fabric's speed is written in a tiny EEPROM inside the cable, and it does not care what the label says.

Both slice one NIC into many. SR-IOV carves PCI devices in silicon; macvlan stacks netdevs in the kernel. Labbed side by side on the same node: 57.8 Gb/s that costs a full CPU core, isolation modes that mirror IB partitions, and the two absences that decide it.

A short nugget on the RDMA verbs API: the four objects every application allocates, the path a work request travels, why one-sided operations leave the remote CPU asleep, and why the same API drives RoCEv2 over Ethernet.

Run any local LLM for the routine work, then auto-escalate to Claude Opus when local stalls. One OpenAI-compatible endpoint, bearer-auth-gated, LAN-exposable. The full build: configs, terminal output, eleven tests, and a Claude Code wrapper.

Kubernetes Ingress gives you host-based routing and TLS termination through a single external IP. This walkthrough covers Contour, self-signed certs, and validating HTTPS load balancing on a Kind cluster from scratch.