Generalities There are many ways to connect your “on Premises” Data Center workloads with Microsoft Azure. I own the full meraki suite at home and have enjoyed it for the past three years. It provides all the features I need. I also have some workloads in Microsoft Azure and wanted to access them using a private and encrypted network instead of accessing them using their public IP. Meraki have the possibility to deploy a vMX 100 in Microsoft Azure. You can deploy a vMX100 either in Azure or in AWS and it will be part of your full mesh VPN as any other MX device that you own. It can support up to 500 Mbps of VPN throughput which can [Read More…]

TL;DR : Code is here. Help yourself 🙂 Introduction to the Net-DevOps Container: Recently, Ethan Banks posted a very interesting blog post where he struggled a little bit to set up a Python environment. If I understood correctly, he wanted to increase his skills set in particular with NetDevOps. He fairly pointed that it could be a bit complicated to handle all the dependencies you might need. Based on the fact that you also want to start fresh between projects you want to spend the least amount of time resolving these kinds of issues and maximize your time on something that is valuable: Learn how to Automate or just Automate your network environment. A lot of people are in a [Read More…]

Intel Atom failures I know the title sounds a bit weird and you may ask why would you need to recover a RAID5 array when all your disks are healthy, right? To understand what is going on, my DS1515+ has an Intel Atom C2538. (source: Synology CPU / NAS Type). It recently caused a lot of issues in the IT industry. (remember the Cisco clock issue? 🙂 ) The Errata AVR54 of the C2000 Specifications update clearly states the following: “system may experience inability to boot or may cease operation”. My NAS was starting to have regular reboots and it completely crashed before I could back up the last delta of data.  In the first instance, Synology denied any abnormal failure rate on this specific [Read More…]

During my Python studies, I came across something that didn’t make much sense to me so I had to learn and investigate (with the help of experts). What you can usually do in Python is to modify a variable and assign the result to the same variable. Because a piece of code is usually worth much more than an explanation:

When you want to sort a list, that behavior is a bit different: let’s pretend I have a list of ARP entries into my switch:

If I want to sort it and reassign the value of it to the previously used variable I would use this code (Let’s pretend arp_entries is my variable that contains all these entries):

[Read More…]

I recently got the chance to deploy a Cisco HyperFlex solution that is composed of 3 Cisco HX nodes in my home lab. As a result, I wanted to share my experience with that new technology (for me). If you do not really know what all this “Hyperconverged Infrastructure hype” is all about, you can read an introduction here. Cisco eased our job by releasing a pre installation spreadsheet and it is very important to read that document with great attention. It will allow you to prepare the baseline of your HC infrastructure. The installation is very straightforward once all the requirements are met. The HX infrastructure has an important peculiarity, it is very very very (did I say very) sensitive [Read More…]