In my new role as Technical Account Manager I work with the customers to evaluate new products and services to validate the fullfillment of the business requirements.

For a recent project I needed to test how some SDWAN appliances reacted to bad network events like packet drops and latency.

Continue reading

Last year I bought an Huawei Matebook D to use at home for light workload like surfing the web (is this term still in use?) and take notes for my blog.

The Matebook replaced my tablet, I preferred an actual laptop over a tablet with a keyboard.

After a year of use I finally decided to install Linux on the laptop. Here I share my experience.

I’ll keep updating this post with new findings.

Continue reading

Sed

String manipulation is a skill that is useful almost on daily basis for most IT professionals.

Continue reading

AirPiConsole part two

Welcome back to AirPiConsole blog post, this is part two. If you read part one and followed the configuration steps you should now have a fully working Raspberry Pi Zero W connected to your WiFi network. You should also be able to connect via Bluetooth to get a console connection without knowing the IP address of the Raspi. Now it’s time to move on and start to actually connect to the serial ports.

Continue reading

AirPiConsole part one

As a network engineer I spend a lot of time with my laptop connected via serial cable to various devices. Physical serial connection is needed for initial device setup and sometimes per customer’s security policy I can’t access the network, so I can only use out-of-band management. I also configure many devices at staging lab that I call the “Theory room” because you know, in theory everything works ;-) Long story short, in 2013 I bought an Airconsole and I really enjoyed the possibility to connect to serial ports over WiFi or Ethernet:

Continue reading

OED Tolls: Linux "at"

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 allows to schedule a command or script to be run at a specific time.

Continue reading

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 like with the familiar Cisco CLI . A good place to store aliases is .bashrc. Add some alias:

Continue reading

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 bunch of Cisco switches. I now NEDI , Observium and LibreNMS can do that but I preferred to write a quick script I could use as a one shot tool instead of a complete software solution.

Continue reading

AWK and Cisco WLC

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 CCIE studies, type in a text editor then copy/paste on the CLI. This approach make easier to spot typos, faster to reuse configuration snippets and to change portions of configuration.

Continue reading

This post is part of a series about Docker, including: Docker Introduction Docker: Install software inside a container Docker Volumes Docker Networking - bridge container to host NIC We started with the basics and moved on with adding software , using volumes and then bridging a container to the network . As a said I’m neither a developer or a system administrator, I work as Network Engineer so I’m not the main target for Docker but I found it very useful for a specific need and now it’s time to join the dots .

Continue reading

Today we’ll see Docker networking with a very specific target in mind: bridge container to the host network. This isn’t supposed to be the way of work of containers: a container should be created to run a single application so container networking, from the point of view of a Network Engineer , is essentially a Port Address Translation with a firewall exception. I know that’s a strong simplification, you can find lot of good explanation about Docker networking on Slideshare .

Continue reading

Docker Volumes

In the last post we saw that any file system change inside a docker container is lost if not committed to the image. What if we want to share data between containers? We can use Docker’s Data Volumes and Data Volume Containers . Data Volumes or Data Volume Containers? Data Volumes feature allows us to mount a local directory from the host inside a container. That looks good but somehow it breaks the concept of isolation between host and container.

Continue reading

Author's picture

ifconfig.it

Where the vNic meets the SDN

Network Engineer

Italy