I’ve spent years designing lossless Ethernet fabrics for latency-sensitive workloads. Here’s why DCBX and RoCE are the unsung backbone of everything from high-frequency trading to training billion-parameter models across GPU clusters.
Series: Learn Datacenter Networking on Your Laptop Part 1: GNS3 Foundation & Linux Networking Primer — Bridges, taps, host networking setup, your first lab Part 2: VLANs, Bonding, and Network Segregation — VLANs, NIC bonding, LACP, bridge isolation Part 3 ← You are here — iPerf3, fiber troubleshooting, Juniper switch diagnostics, throughput testing I spent last weekend debugging a link between two Juniper switches that was running at 2Gbps on a 10G interface. The fiber was plugged in, the lights were blinking, and both switches happily reported “Link is up.” Everything looked fine. Except it wasn’t. ...
Series: Learn Datacenter Networking on Your Laptop Part 1: GNS3 Foundation & Linux Networking Primer — Bridges, taps, host networking setup, your first lab Part 2 ← You are here — VLANs, NIC bonding, network segregation Part 3: iPerf3, Fiber, and Juniper — Testing Like a Pro — Throughput testing, fiber diagnostics, Juniper config Here’s a thing about real datacenter networks nobody warns you about: you’ll spend more time debugging VLANs and bonding than you will configuring routing. ...
Series: Learn Datacenter Networking on Your Laptop Part 1 ← You are here — GNS3 foundation, virtual networking mental model, bridges, taps, Linux networking across distros Part 2: VLANs, Bonding, and Network Segregation — VLANs, NIC bonding modes, LACP, bridge isolation Part 3: iPerf3, Fiber, and Juniper — Testing Your Datacenter Network Like a Pro I’ve been managing datacenter networks for a few years now. Not hyperscaler stuff — the kind where you have real switching infrastructure, multiple VLANs screaming across bonded NICs, and the constant background anxiety of wondering which unlabeled cable goes to production storage. ...
System Role: A high-availability Raspberry Pi 4 hosting a redundant RAID 1 storage array, acting as a transparent router for a LAN subnet, enforcing DNS filtering via AdGuard Home, and serving a Nextcloud instance externally via Cloudflare Tunnels. Host: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB RAM) Hostname: pi03 OS: Debian 12 (Bookworm) Functions: Multi-WAN Router, AdGuard Home DNS Filter, Nextcloud Storage (RAID 1), Cloudflare Tunnel. Date: November 2025 System Architecture & Network Design This system operates as a transparent router for a LAN subnet while hosting secure personal cloud services accessible from the internet. ...
A veteran sys admins journal on changes that has come around and being a devops
Hands-on exploration of cluster provisioning, network isolation, and tenant automation in a lab-scale Kubernetes setup.