With a good amount of surprise I've been nominated Cisco Champion for 2016:

Because of your impactful and valuable contributions to the IT community, you have been chosen out of hundreds of nominees to be part of the 2016 Cisco Champion program. Congratulations! …

Another post on Linux commands, short and simple but very useful: at.

The problem

As IT pros we are all comfortable with the change window concept.

This window usually opens at night or during the week-end and sometimes the change actually just requires a few commands on a Linux machine.

The automation

The at command …

After a few posts about Windows software now it's time for Linux.

The problem

Working with the Linux bash sometimes requires to type long commands multiple times. Isn't that a motivation strong enough to look for a better way?

The automation

Linux alias is quite self-explanatory, it allows to create command aliases …

The problem

Install software on Windows and keep it updated is a boring and repetitive task.

Linux and BSD/OSX users can install software from packages and keep it updated with a simple apt-get update;apt-get upgrade command.

Wouldn't it be great to have the same feature on Windows?

The automation

Chocolatey is a …

The problem

As many IT professionals I work quite often on the command line with many command prompts open.

Windows lacks a good native command prompt software so usually you see monitors filled with black terminals that are hard to manage and track.

The automation

ConsoleZ allows multiple tabs and to split tabs …

The problem

Security today is a main concern for every computer user. One of the first problem is how to manage password.

I see many creative solutions around: post-it or paper only, use of the same password for all services, a spreadsheet inside an encrypted zip file... none of them appear safe or efficient.

The …

The problem

I manage many networks and quite often I work at customer site.

For every site I need and IP address, gateway, Wi-Fi network, sometimes proxy, a printer and many other unique network settings.

Change IP address on Windows is a process that takes too much time and many clicks.

The automation

I used to use …

I read this blog post from Mattias Geniar and I think he gave a name of a concept I had in my mind from years.

It started a while ago when I tried to find a more efficient ways to do my daily work and it got bigger and bigger up to be almost an... obsession.

Obsession is actually a negative word related do some sort of …

Today I passed exam VCP550 and got VMware VCP5-DCV certification.

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Scripts, usually I write some because I don't like repetitive tasks and I'm lazy, meaning I prefer automation over useless hard work.

Don't know where I found this quote but I like it:

Don't spend your time doing work a well-trained monkey could do.

Today's request was quite simple: get model and serial number from a …

For the second year in a row I attended Wireless Lan Professionals Conference Europe, this time in Berlin.

Location

The choice of location this time was much better, last year I went to Maastrich through Brussels, most people didn't liked it since it's not easy to reach.

The sessions

Session quality is high, mostly …

When you see an hacker movie you see people typing on the keyboard very fast. Actually the toughest the hacker is the faster he types very long commands and all of them work the first time.

Want to impress friends and colleagues? Type on the hackertyper ;-)

More experienced network engineers, as I learned during my …

IP addressing design is a topic that follows every networker from the basic to the architect level of experience.

Usually we just pick a random range from RFC1918 and address all the devices.

But then VPN happens, and with VPN comes the risk of overlapping.

How do we fix overlapping? With NAT of course!

In this post …

Platform: CISCO2921 IOS version: 15.3(3)M5

Load the anyconnect package on the flash of the router and configure anyconnect client package (be patient, this may take a while...):

crypto vpn anyconnect flash0:/webvpn/anyconnect-win-4.1.04011-k9.pkg sequence 1
SSLVPN Package SSL-VPN-Client (seq:1): installed successfully …

As a holder of many technical certifications every few months I have to renew some.

When possible I try to renew the certifications with a new track instead of doing the newer version of the exam I've already done.

This time was the turn of HP ASE - Network Infrastructure 2011 to be renewed as HP ASE - FlexNetwork …