Monthly Archives: October 2014 - Page 3

Behind the scenes of RANCID (5 of 30)

Posted by on October 18, 2014 No comments

If you are a network guy, even if you have never installed, used, or seen RANCID, you probably still know about it. However, in case not, you can find more at Shrubbery Networks, where you will find this short write-up on what RANCID does.

RANCID monitors a router’s (or more generally a device’s) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System) or Subversion to maintain history of changes.

There is a log of documentation on how to install, configure and run RANCID, but I haven’t found much that explains how all of the configurations files and scripts interact with each other.… Read more

Vendor Eval Sheet (4 of 30)

Posted by on October 18, 2014 No comments

When doing a vendor evaluation it is never fun process, especially if it is a company you are working with the first time. First the vendor comes in with their sales guy, even though you specifically asked to have a technical resource to come instead, they insist they want to “get a feel” for you are looking for. You get the nice brochure, you have that waste of a meeting, and if you are like me, you partially torture the guy, in mostly good fun.… Read more

CLI your CLI (3 of 30)

Posted by on October 17, 2014 No comments

For the last decade I have been launching my putty from a simple windows+r. I have done so well over 20,000 times in the last 7 years alone, (don’t ask how I know that.) You might remember this feature being depicted in on EtherealMind’s blog post, though I rarely see other net-eng or linux types using this feature. To build on that same topic, there have been three things that I have been doing. The first is integrating within a simple batch file, and the second is integrating tabbed putty via SuperPutty, and finally setting up logging of all my terminal activity.… Read more

Palo Alto to HTML Script (2 of 30)

Posted by on October 16, 2014 No comments

 

I posted this on Palo Alto’s support site a while ago, but here it is in the open.

I wrote a perl script that I am using to display the ruleset from 4.1 through 6.x firewalls. It is as simple as I know how to make it, which probably isn’t that simple. I am not a developer, and if you look at my code it shows. I have seen several people ask for tag and zone based views, plus ability to export to excel, so this is an alternative method until PA supports that.… Read more

I am Network Expert… and SO can you!! (in your worst Russian accent) (1 of 30)

Posted by on October 14, 2014 No comments

So why I am here making such grandiose statements? Over a year ago I read an article on Lifehacker about  Impostor Syndrome, after that I started to reflect on myself and compare myself to other’s in the networking world. I realized when I would compare myself to Greg, Ethan or Ivan from the blogsphere (who I gained a lot of information from) I would feel like an impostor and not expert, that they are the professionals and not me. Then after reading the Lifehacker article, I started to look at it from the other perspective, there are many other people that I read, learn from, and enjoy that presumably have more or less knowledge, experience, and intelligence… but they are contributing all the same.… Read more