Scripts, labs, Git and the tooling that gets a network engineer out of copy and paste.
Think about the last lab you built by hand. Dragging routers around a canvas, wiring links one at a time, inventing an addressing plan you’d forgotten by Thursday, and pasting the same baseline config into every node before you could even start on the thing you built the lab to learn. The plumbing takes hours.
Think about the last lab you built by hand.
In Part 1 we got an Nginx container running, both with raw docker run and with a one service compose.yaml. That was the setup.
So, your runbook repo is now shared. Three of you commit to it, the playbooks get used in real change windows, and last Tuesday somebody pushed broken YAML straight to main without anyone noticing.
Three months ago you ran a docker run command from a blog post and got Pi-hole working. Three weeks later it died on a reboot and never came back.
You finally caved and started using Claude. You opened a new chat and typed something like this. prompt My BGP session keeps dropping. How do I fix it? What came back was a CCNA-level checklist.
Somebody asks in standup: “why did we change the ACL on edge-fw-02 last quarter? Who did it, and what else did they touch?” You know the answer lives in the repo.
192.168.10.37/26. Network, mask, broadcast, first host, last host, usable count. No calculator, no cheat sheet. If you rattled all six off without breaking stride, you got your reps in somewhere.
You’ve had git in your daily workflow for a few weeks. You’ve got the basics down, until you do one of these… You committed vault_password.txt and pushed it before your second coffee.
Declared bias up front. Jeff Doyle is a friend, but that doesn’t influence what comes next.
Last Tuesday you made changes to a playbook because the on-call engineer needed an ACL pushed in a hurry.
Most “AI-powered observability” pitches you sit through ask you to trust the model.
Dr. Deepak Kakadia got about ninety seconds into his NFD40 talk before he said the thing nobody else on the AI Ops circuit is willing to say out loud. LLMs were invented to model human behavior.
Thomas Scheibe walked on stage and said the quiet part out loud.
Anyone who has managed carrier circuits for a living knows the pain. Quoting takes forever. Installs drag on with zero visibility.
Every network engineer has that moment. You’re troubleshooting something, you reach for the tool that should exist, and it either doesn’t or it was last updated when Obama was in office.
During Networking Field Day 15 our friends from the Linux Foundation, including Lisa Caywood, briefed us on a recent “acquisition” from Cisco.
Whenever I start talking about network visibility and aggreagation taps I can’t help but think of The Matrix.
Forward Networks has stepped out of the shadows to announce their Network Assurance platform, and I was fortunate enough to be a delegate for Networking Field Day 13 to see their first public …
Today’s IT landscape if full of software defined marketecture, and lore of a dystopian future full of network engineers that do nothing but write code.
Looking for the printable version? This list now lives as a cheatsheet at /tools/well-known-intervals/ — same data, scannable card layout, with a “Print / Save as PDF” button for taking it with you.
As of ACS v5.4 Cisco has finally included VMware tools for their ADE OS.
Vi is arguably the best text editing software in the world. There, I said it… deal with it!
As a follow up to my blog post covering Vim on the PacketPushers blog, I wanted to share with you another time saving tip for getting our jobs done not only quickly, but helping to remove one of the …
Ever get locked out of a router or switch that is many hours or even days away? Recently, I had the pleasure, again.
I got asked a rather interested question the other day.
Netcat or nc, is a forgotten tool in too many arsenals these days. It lays dormant waiting at the command line to make connections across the globe for you.
As you may know, I am not big in the server world, even less into mail servers. They make me sick.
How many times a day do you issue a show command from configuration mode ? If you’re anything like me, its enough to get annoying.
Before I even get started, I want to mention that not all regular expression metacharacters are supported in every application. Keep this in mind when building your matches.
Ok — this is my first script that I’m posting here. Its a VERY simple ssh wrapper script that you can place in your path, preferably in ~/bin bash #!