Troubleshooting

2026.05.26 Automation & Tools 10 min read

Selector at NFD40: Show Your Work

Most “AI-powered observability” pitches you sit through ask you to trust the model.

2026.05.19 Automation & Tools 9 min read

Networks Are Graphs. NetAI Acts Like It.

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.

2026.03.17 Automation & Tools 10 min read

Building the Tools I Wished I Had

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.

2023.05.10 Opinions & Tangents 3 min read

Cisco Viptela drops the ball

In 2012, we saw the launch of Viptela, a pioneer in SDWAN network solutions.

2015.08.10 Automation & Tools 4 min read

Well-Known Intervals

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.

2011.02.14 Networking 7 min read

IOS Embedded Packet Capture

Tired of setting up SPAN sessions? Need to do some packet analysis? Since IOS 12.4(20)T Cisco has made Embedded Packet Capture (EPC) available.

2010.05.22 Networking 1 min read

Measuring Cable Lengths on a Catalyst Switch

A while back, I was playing on a 3750 switch in a customers lab and came across something I’ve never seen before. It seems that some Cisco switches have a built in Time-domain reflectometer, or TDR.

2010.04.19 Automation & Tools 3 min read

Netcat – secret weapon

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.

2009.09.15 Automation & Tools 4 min read

Mail Server Relay Testing

As you may know, I am not big in the server world, even less into mail servers. They make me sick.

2009.08.23 Networking 2 min read

Testing TCP Connectivity on Cisco Devices

Ever thought you might be having some Layer 4 connectivity issues? Pings as you should know are ICMP transmissions and ICMP is a Layer 3 protocol (commonly used to send error messages).