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…]

Recently I was lucky enough to play with Cisco Hyperflex in a lab and since it was funny to play with, I decided to write a basic blog post about the hyper-converged infrastructure concept (experts, you can move forward and read something else 🙂 ). It has really piqued my interest. I know I may be late to the game but better late than never right? 🙂 Legacy IT Infrastructure Back in the days, you had to have separate silo to maintain a complete infrastructure (it is still true by the way, but it tends to become more and more frequent that networks, servers, and storage are progressively forming a single IT platform …. sorry I meant “cloud”): Compute(System and Virtualization) [Read More…]

I recently relocated to the US from France/Switzerland and I have been so busy the past 2 years working on that process. Yes, It is that long!  I have been asked about career advice twice this week and I wanted to share my thoughts about it. Networking in 2008 I think we all agree on the fact that the networking field has been very static for the past 15 years. One of the ways to provide a better network experience to the users/applications was to add more bandwidth (or invest in WAN optimization). OSPF/BGP/EIRGRP/MPLS and spanning tree haven’t changed much since 2002 right?   All the networking manufacturers paradigm was all about releasing new hardware that could provide more bandwidth and [Read More…]