opinion Mt Princeton Sables (Nathrop, CO) - Friendly and courteous, but terrifying experience... And now for an atypical (see: non-technical) post, filing this one under the "opinion" tag. This is a review and detailed recount of my family's less-than-ideal horse-riding experience at Mt Princeton
cisco Cisco Login via SSH Key (Passwordless) Login to your Cisco NX-OS and IOS-XE devices using public key authentication (passwordless).
jinja2 Revisiting Jinja2 Switch Templating Revisiting Jinja2 switch templating for Cisco switches using FreeZTP; optimizing templates and processes.
cisco Network Security: Black-hole Bad Actors Network security will always be more important than ever before. Those of us who are trusted to implement and administer infrastructure would be wise to never remain complacent with our security policies.
cisco ASA Email Notifications - AnyConnect VPN How to configure email alerts for AnyConnect VPN client activity on the ASA platform.
cisco Cisco Trunk-splosion Protection On IOS switches with EEM, protect yourself (and less careful Jr engineers) with this applet that will prevent allowed-vlan-mishaps on trunks!
Time is of the Essense Time synchronization among network devices is important to consider when building out infrastructure, and not just within the datacenter...
Wiring the Gaming Floor: Fiber vs Copper Considering gaming floor connectivity, the future has effectively already been here for some time. Serial connections are all but a bygone technology, any vendor worth their salt now supports Ethernet for EGM connectivity.
linux FileCloud Sync Client on Linux Getting the FileCloud Sync Linux client working and accessible can be a bit cumbersome; this is an installation script for the Linux FileCloud sync client.
jinja2 Jinja2 Switch Templating with FreeZTP This is a sanitized example of a switch template that I built out with a strong focus on keeping the process as simple and unbreakable as possible for the intended end-users.
cisco Cisco EEM: Auto Interface Descriptions These applets will automatically update the description of an interface where a new CDP neighbor is detected, if not already described accordingly.
cisco Cisco Smart Install - IOS-XE Stack Auto-Allocation When this snippet is added to a Jinja2 template it will automatically build out an EEM applet that will set switch priorities and renumber all switches in the stack.
cisco Cisco Smart Install - IOS-XE Upgrade Caveat IOS-XE 3.7.4 cannot upgrade to 16.3.6 via smart-install because *new force* isn't appended. This workaround uses EEM applets in the FreeZTP J2 switch template to download install the updated image.
cisco AnyConnect VPN with(out) DUO 2FA A user's status can be set as 'Bypass' in the Duo Admin Panel (to bypass 2FA), but as an exercise we can also use Duo's Auth Proxy along side a separate authentication server in an environment with Duo 2FA users and non-2FA users.
pi-hole Pi-hole: Local DNS, Public DOH Using Pi-hole and Cloudflare’s new 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 public DNS servers together is a good idea… bolting DoH (DNS over HTTPS) onto that via the Cloudflared daemon is an even better idea (until Pi-hole natively supports DoH anyways).
securecrt SecureCRT: Session Logging Session logging can prove extremely useful when recollecting events during troubleshooting scenarios or even configuration-binges. SecureCRT’s logging settings allow the use of variables to define the filename/path.
cisco NX-OS Default Interface from Enable Mode Considering the 9000v is really only for labbing this isn’t a huge deal, but I was able but to default an interface from enable mode; config mode is not required.
cisco NX-OS Dynamic Routing over vPC VLAN Configure EIGRP on the N9K platform to establish dynamic routing adjacencies and achieve ECMP on a vPC VLAN.
opinion Network Engineering, Musical Chairs I hear this *rule* regarding changing jobs frequently as a Network Engineer, focused primarily on maximizing income potential; I'm thinking there has to be exceptions to this.
securecrt SecureCRT: Flow Control Paste To help prevent overwhelming network devices while pasting in large configuration files, user miked provided a script that you can use in SecureCRT on the Van Dyke forums.
cisco Fix: Cisco MARS Upgrade from Recovery Recently I received an RMA replacement for a CS-MARS-20 unit that had a failing drive. After restoring the backup from version 6.1.5 everything was back to normal, but we needed to get onto the latest version (6.1.8).
