Home on Jacopo Rota - r00ta

Fixing painfully slow GNS3 Cloud throughput with one ethtool command

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:15:00 +0100

The setup

I was building a lab in GNS3 to test a switch-provisioning system: a controller VM plus some switches, all wired to the outside world through Cloud nodes bound to a physical NIC on the GNS3 host.

Everything worked, until I had to copy a ~2.5 GB SONiC image onto the controller VM. The upload crawled. My first instinct was the same as everyone’s: “it’s the network virtualization overhead”. It wasn’t — or at least, not in the way I expected.

Replacing RBAC with ReBAC in MAAS: Embedding OpenFGA for Fine-Grained Access Control

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:00:00 +0100

Replacing RBAC with ReBAC in MAAS: Embedding OpenFGA for Fine-Grained Access Control

Hello everyone,

In this post I want to share the work I did to bring relationship-based access control (ReBAC) to MAAS by embedding OpenFGA directly into the region controller. This replaces the previous permission layer based on roles (RBAC) with a much more flexible, fine-grained model powered by OpenFGA, the open-source implementation of Google’s Zanzibar authorization system.

MAAS 3.8 ships this as the built-in authorization system. The legacy Canonical RBAC integration is deprecated in 3.8 and fully removed in MAAS 4.0.

Introducing NetBox as a Snap

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:06:05 +0100

Introducing NetBox as a Snap

Hello everyone,

NetBox is the leading open-source solution for modeling and documenting modern networks, combining IPAM (IP Address Management) and DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) into a single powerful tool. However, deploying it manually involves setting up Python virtual environments, configuring Gunicorn, managing static files, and more. To simplify this process, I have packaged NetBox as a Snap.

You can download the Snap from Snapcraft, and the source code is available on GitHub.

Speeding up MAAS CLI

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:06:05 +0100

MAAS CLI Overview

The MAAS CLI is a command-line interface for managing MAAS, a tool for managing and deploying cloud infrastructure. The CLI can be used to perform various tasks such as creating and managing nodes, configuring networks, and deploying applications. Also, it can be used to perform administrative tasks such as configuring users, the database and MAAS itself when it is executed locally on a MAAS region/rack node.

The problem

The MAAS CLI is known to be pretty slow, taking usually more than 2 seconds to perform any action. This is a known problem that is affecting MAAS since the very beginning. This is due to the fact that the CLI is actually building the entiere CLI parser at every invocation, and the administrative commands (such as createadmin, configure-tls and others) are django commands, and require django to be setup.

Introducing Temporal Server and UI as a Snap

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:06:05 +0100

Introducing Temporal Server and UI as a Snap

Hello everyone,

Temporal is a powerful tool for building reliable and scalable applications. However, setting up and configuring the Temporal Server manually can be cumbersome, especially for those who prefer not to use Docker or Kubernetes. To simplify this process, I have packaged Temporal Server as a Snap, providing built-in utilities for easy installation and configuration.

You can download the Snap from Snapcraft, and the source code is available on GitHub.

Welcome to my new blog

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:06:05 +0100

Hey everyone!

This blog will be my central hub for everything I’m working on across the web. I’ll be sharing posts on topics that (hopefully!) interest you, along with links to other projects I’m building.

One of those projects is a dedicated site about MAAS, which you can check out here: https://docs.r00ta.com. Stay tuned for more updates!

About

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Currently a Software Engineer @ Canonical. Cycling and running lover.

I’m r00ta, also known as Jacopo Rota in the real world. I don’t know how you landed here, but hey, welcome!

When I was at the University I had two main passions: cyber security and machine learning - in particular the so called statistical learning. I used to play CTF (Capture the Flag) contests with Fuffateam, you can find some write ups in this repo.

MAAS

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since May 2023 I’m working on MAAS . Given that I lost count of the amount of hours I spent reading/writing code and debugging issues, I thought it was a good idea to dedicate a website for my memories.

Please see https://maas.r00ta.com.