Automation & Tools

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.

Mid December 2012 Apple shut down the Messages Beta for Lion, soon after many hackintosh users started noticing issues with signing into iMessage.

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.

Recently, I was using one of my custom short cuts and fat fingered the F12 key on my laptop… What resulted was my screen shutting off.

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.

Everyone does a fair amount of googling these days, but any network engineer can tell you that a quick ARIN whois search can be invalueable. I know I end up there quite often.

So, I had to reinstall Vista on my mac today — hadn’t touched it since I moved onto the Late 08 model… and once again, I started getting the common partition errors while Vista loads the bootloader.

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 #!