I got an interesting question from a reader. He listened to my podcast with Eric Chou and decided to try to learn in public:
Currently, I’m studying for the CCNP ENARSI exam, and would like to start posting my labs to LinkedIn, and perhaps even upload my lab topologies and configs to Git.
That’s a great idea. I would minimize the LinkedIn part1 and focus on Git:
TL;DR - For anyone who doesn’t want to go through the full post, here’s the short version. I bought the UGreen NASync DXP2800 (2 bay) from Amazon for £249 and paired it with two Seagate Ironwolf 8TB HDDs, around £180 each.
The unit comes with an Intel N100 CPU, 8GB of RAM (upgradeable to 16GB, but there’s only one RAM slot), and a 2.5Gb/s LAN port. It has a solid build, was easy to set up, and I actually like the UI. Sure, it lacks a lot of features compared to Synology or QNAP, but since I’m mainly using it for file storage, I’m happy with the purchase.
Suresh Vina
The short answer is, this is the best bang for the buck. For £249, I’m getting a 2-bay NAS with an N100 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 2.5Gb/s LAN port, and two NVMe slots.
I’ve been wanting to buy a NAS for over Continue reading
Password hygiene drives IT professionals crazy–people forget their passwords, will not change them often enough, and choose weak ones. But are IT folks immune to these problems? What is the psychology behind passwords, and how do we do better? Karl Buhl joins Tom and Russ to talk about passwords.
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Unsurprisingly, the main topic of conversation at the recent Dell Technologies World 2025 event in Las Vegas was AI, and a central theme that wove through many of the messages we heard there was that adopting the emerging technology is much easier now than it was even a year ago. …
Dell’s Advice To Enterprises: Buy AI, Don’t Try To Build It was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
We know there are three main ways to move packets across a network. However, before we can start forwarding packets, someone has to populate the forwarding tables in the intermediate devices or build the sequence of nodes to traverse in source routing.
Usually, whoever is responsible for the contents of the forwarding tables must first discover the network topology. Let’s start there, using the following network diagram to illustrate the discussion.
If you follow me or read my blog, you probably know I'm a big advocate of Containerlab. I've been using it for over two years now and I absolutely love it. Why? Because it's open source, it has an amazing community behind it (thank you again, Roman), and labs are defined using simple YAML files that are easy to share and reuse.
So far, I've used Cisco IOL, Arista EOS, and Palo Alto VM in Containerlab. And finally, the time came to try Juniper. I decided to test the Juniper vJunos-router, which is a virtualized MX router. It's a single-VM version of vMX that doesn't require any feature licenses and is meant for lab or testing purposes. You can even download the image directly from Juniper's website without needing an account. Thank you, Juniper and Cisco, please take note. In this post, I'll show you how to run Juniper vJunos-router in Containerlab.
This post assumes you're somewhat familiar with Containerlab and already have it installed. If you're new, feel free to check out my introductory blog below. Containerlab also has great documentation on how to use vJunos-router, so be sure to check that out as well.
When you drive around the major metropolitan areas of this great country of ours, and indeed in any most of the developed countries at this point, you see two things. …
AWS Plunks Down $10 Billion For Datacenters In North Carolina was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If the device you are reading this on has an IPv4 address, it is very likely not a publicly routeable one. This is because the wide scale dep
Just when you thought you got used to the weirdnesses in the networking implementations, you get a curveball like this one. Life is never dull if you test network devices.
Before releasing netlab release 2.0, I ran the full suite of integration tests for all devices for which I have the images. Interestingly, most VXLAN tests failed for Cumulus Linux 4.x even though we haven’t touched that code for ages.
Next step: trying to figure out what changed. The configuration changes were minimal. Even worse, the failure was non-deterministic. Somehow, we managed to transform a Cumulus Linux 4.x VM into a Heisenberg switch.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is going through yet another restructuring to reduce costs, something we have seen a lot of in the past two decades and a half decades since it acquired Compaq to become a volume server peddler as well as high end system supplier for enterprises. …
HPE Uses AI To Drive The Business, Which Is Increasingly AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If you’ve managed traffic in Kubernetes, you’ve likely navigated the world of Ingress controllers. For years, Ingress has been the standard way of getting HTTP/S services exposed. But let’s be honest, it often felt like a compromise. We wrestled with controller-specific annotations to unlock critical features, blurred the lines between infrastructure and application concerns, this complexity didn’t just make portability more difficult, it sometimes led to security vulnerabilities and other complications.
As part of Calico Open Source v3.30, we have released a free and open source Calico Ingress Gateway that implements a custom built Envoy proxy with the Kubernetes Gateway API standard to help you navigate Ingress complexities with style. This blog post is designed to get you up to speed on why such a change might be the missing link in your environment.
The challenge with traditional Ingress wasn’t a lack of effort, since the landscape is full of innovative solutions. However, the problem was the lack of a unified, expressive, and role-aware standard. Existing ingress controllers were capable, implemented advanced features, however at the same time tied you to a specific project/vendor.
This meant:
Jo attempted to follow the vendor Kool-Aid recommendations and use NETCONF/YANG to configure network devices. Here’s what he found (slightly edited):
IMHO, the whole NETCONF ecosystem primarily suffers from a tooling problem. Or I haven’t found the right tools yet.
ncclient is (as you mentioned somewhere else) an underdocumented mess. And that undocumented part is not even up to date. The commit hash at the bottom of the docs page is from 2020… I am amazed how so many people got it working well enough to depend on it in their applications.