Added Raspberry Pi Cluster for Experimenting

I just added a Raspberry Pi Cluster (4 RPis) to experiment with BGP and IPSec VPNs.  My thought was to have a No-Mans Land VLAN running through the house in which I could tap into with the cluster.  Since the NML vlan traffic wouldn't touch any of the other vlans it would make it easy to try out different types of routing protocols.  I could also use one of the RPis to act as an IPSec VPN server to connect from the outside to the NML vlan.  I could set it up so that it might be on a DMZ or other path.  I am therefore not constrained even though I have double routers in my network.  The cluster can be seen in this picture taken this morning:




When I was putting this together I was running some tests on a bench with the following layout:

I moved the cluster and router (acting as an 8 port managed switch) to an area where I have a UPS so that the power would be filtered.  The first item on the list is to get a reasonable IPSec VPN running, hopefully using StrongSwan with some decent encryption, say AES256.  Since the router has a WAN port, I can use that any time that I need to update the RPis in the cluster - just add a wire and then take it away.  I did discover one issue though, I am going to have to remove the Mac Mini from the NML vlan because I noticed that all of the ports that were open on my personal vlan were open on the NML vlan.  I don't know how to correct that so for now, after I get the IPSec VPN setup, I will remove the Mac Mini so I can reduce the probability that someone will hack into my network.