UGreen NASync DXP2800 Review and First Impressions

UGreen NASync DXP2800 Review and First Impressions

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.

Setting up Proxmox Backup Server
In this post, we’ll go through the process of setting up Proxmox Backup Server and backing up all the VMs from my Proxmox server to this backup server. So, let’s get to it.
UGreen NASync DXP2800 Review and First ImpressionsPacketswitchSuresh Vina
UGreen NASync DXP2800 Review and First Impressions

But Why UGreen NAS?

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

HN784: Accelerate Your Network Automation With Gluware Labs and New Ansible Collection (Sponsored)

Network automation is today’s topic with sponsor Gluware. Gluware provides a network automation platform that targets both network engineers and automation builders. On today’s Heavy Networking, we discuss how Gluware supports these two constituencies. We also talk about a recent product announcement, Gluware Labs. Gluware Labs includes a free Community Edition of Gluware software you... Read more »

Dell’s Advice To Enterprises: Buy AI, Don’t Try To Build It

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.

Finding End-to-End Paths: Topology and Endpoints

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.

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Juniper vJunos-router in Containerlab

Juniper vJunos-router in Containerlab

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.

Prerequisites

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.

Containerlab - Creating Continue reading

N4N029: Four Goals of Network Design

Let’s explore four goals of network design: stability, speed, scalability, and security. These goals are based on Ethan’s experience designing, building, and operating networks. Network architects and design experts might have other objectives, and that’s fine, but these four goals are the basis of today’s episode. Ethan and Holly discuss why these four goals are... Read more »

Weird: Ports on Linux Bridge Are Stuck

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.

Read more …

D2DO274: Firefly’s State of IaC Report for 2025, aka ClickOps Is a Disgrace (Sponsored)

Firefly is a cloud infrastructure automation platform that helps cloud teams, DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, DevSecOps, and other groups manage their entire cloud as code. Firefly helps to manage cloud complexity and produce consistent and efficient cloud platforms with code. To help Firefly better understand their customers and industry trends around Infrastructure as Code (IaC),... Read more »

HPE Uses AI To Drive The Business, Which Is Increasingly AI

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.

Worth Reading 060425


There is an interesting article from the Brookings Institute that documents four trends in infrastructure funding. The conclusions of the report surprised me and I suspect they will surprise others.


And when details do emerge, they usually involve a retraction. IBM laid off 8,000 workers in 2023, and then hired them back in May 2025. In 2024, a top headline for Klarna was “Klarna’s AI Assistant Is Doing The Job Of 700 Workers” but a year later it was “Klarna Reverses AI-Only Customer Support Strategy.”


I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of the RPKI infrastructure.


OFC 2025 made one thing clear: The transition to Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) switches in data centres is inevitable, driven primarily by the power savings they offer.


I’d like to look at that spike in the total route count that occurred on the 1st May in further detail. Between 16:00 UTC on the 1st May and 18:00 UTC on the same day, Continue reading

Is It Time to Migrate? A Practical Look at Kubernetes Ingress vs. Gateway API

If you’ve managed traffic in Kubernetes, you’ve likely worked with Ingress controllers. For years, Ingress has been the standard way to expose HTTP and HTTPS services. But in practice, it often came with trade-offs. Controller-specific annotations were required to unlock critical features, the line between infrastructure and application responsibilities was unclear, and configurations often became tied to the implementation rather than the intent.

Ingress NGINX Retirement Raises the Stakes

Recently, the Kubernetes community announced that Ingress NGINX will be formally retired, with only best-effort maintenance provided until March 2026. After that point, there will be no bug fixes, no security updates, and the project will move to read-only archival status. Any cluster still relying on Ingress NGINX after that date will be running an unsupported controller, which increases maintenance overhead and security risk.

For many organizations, now is the time to treat this as a high-priority project: inventory all clusters using Ingress NGINX, create a migration plan (test, convert, cut over), and avoid ending up in a reactive scramble as the March 2026 deadline approaches.

If the move from Ingress to the Gateway API once felt optional, this new timeline changes the situation. Depending on an aging data-plane component without Continue reading

What Developers Should Know About Modern CDNs and the Edge

When the web was first scaling up, content delivery networks (CDNs) became a way of dealing with the ever-increasing load. Akamai is widely considered the pioneer of CDN technology in the late-1990s, but arguably it’s been overtaken now by younger, more agile CDN competitors. At least that’s the view of fashions itself as an “edge cloud platform.” “Akamai was the first cloud service, the first multitenant cloud service,” Bergman told The New Stack in an interview. “And I think if they had been developer-friendly, then they should have been as large of a player as AWS, right?” Akamai may not have been the very first cloud service, but it was definitely among the first — and its CDN debuted well before “

Where Are the NETCONF/YANG Tools?

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.

Read more …

A Day in the Life of BGP

I want to look at just one day of the operation of the Internet’s BGP network by looking at the behaviour of a single BGP session. Nothing special or extraordinary happened on that day. There were no large-scale power blackouts, no major faults in the world’s submarine cable network, nor in the terrestrial trunk cable systems. No headlining-grabbing cyber attack took place on that day, as far as I’m aware. It was just an ordinary Thursday on the Internet, just like any other day, and I selected this day due to its very ordinariness! WhAt can this day tell us about BGP and the way we use it?

My Experience at AutoCon3

My Experience at AutoCon3

This is my second time attending the AutoCon event. The first one I went to was last year in Amsterdam (AutoCon1), and it was absolutely amazing. I decided to attend again this year, and AutoCon3 took place from the 26th to the 30th of May. The first two days were dedicated to workshops, and the conference itself ran from the 28th to the 30th. I only attended the conference. I heard there were around 650 attendees at this event, which is great to see.

Network Automation Forum (NAF)

In case you’ve never heard of AutoCon, it’s a community-driven conference focused on network automation, organized by the Network Automation Forum (NAF). NAF brings together people from across the industry to share ideas, tools, and best practices around automation, orchestration, and observability in networking.

They typically hold two conferences each year, one in Europe and one in the USA, or at least that’s how it’s been so far. The European event is usually around the end of May, and the US one takes place around November. Tickets are released in tiers, with early bird pricing being cheaper. I grabbed the early bird ticket for 299 euros as soon as it was announced.

Continue reading

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