Recent Posts

I am moving my website over to Hugo. Its a static site generator that uses markdown syntax and a templating system. The binary is written in Golang and it is super fast. I honestly got tired of all the authentication attempts trying to login to wordpress, it is insane how many of them there are per day. Even with a blocking mechanism in place, still hundreds on just this little site.

I recently had the need to figure out the date and time in my local timezone (Phoenix) for a future appointment. Bookings on a website don’t open until 12:01AM in their local timezone (HST), so how can you determine what date and time that is locally? Don’t want to be late to book! Counting on the calendar can be wrong by a day as well. Python to the rescue. Two libraries make this easy: datetime and pytz.

This post will walk through a quick script that connects to a Cumulus switch and runs a command. Cumulus has a virtual machine appliance called VX available for free to run your tests on. Cumulus VX Much of this can be found on the netmiko github:Netmiko There is an examples directory that goes into more details for adding things like concurrency. If you are running this on 10+ switches in series, things get slow!

I see a hundred different guides online but none of them really document the easy way to setup a reverse tunnel. Q: What is a reverse tunnel? Great question! A reverse tunnel is needed when you are trying to connect to a client computer from an outside connection. A typical scenario is the device you need access to is behind a firewall or proxy. Since you can’t make a direct connection to it (say you want to VNC, RDP, SSH to it, etc), a tunnel is the best way to poke a hole.

If you manage a bunch of Redhat Enterprise Linux servers (RHEL), it can be wasteful or difficult to update packages from the internet each time (or you don’t have enough subscriptions). So let’s create a package repository on a local server which will update every night and allow the other internal servers to access it. This is particularly useful if only one server on your network has internet access or you have a slower connection.

It has been quite an adventure the last couple years, I finally was able to visit the South Pole, both geographic and ceremonial. There are two of them and they actually have poles. Each year the winter staff creates a new marker for the geographic pole, since it moves around 30ft per year. I have never felt cold like I did there, and it was not a very cold time. Since the summer season is opposite of the U.

It has been a rush the past couple months planning and preparing! I have been working at McMurdo station in Antartica for a month now as a Senior Network Engineer. This has been on my list of jobs to keep an eye out for, and the opportunity came about. I have to say it has been a great journey so far, dealing with the new environment (I have been in a hot desert the last 9 years, so a cold desert is different!

I recently have been on a serverless kick. What is that you ask? Well, it means running code in the cloud without managing any server resources or having a server operating system that is always running. Even better, you only pay for resources when your code is executing. Hosting solutions have been around for a long time, but they typically run all the time, and you pay for that (also you might have to manage and update your server).

Meteor 1.5 is out and we can finally do code splitting! If you are not familiar with code splitting, this allows us to separate our logic in a single page web app (SPA) and only send the client the relevant portions of code. This is useful in a couple immediate ways: You have a giant application that is too large to send at once (any script files over 1MB often take too long and the user experience is terrible) You want to keep some portions of code hidden until the user is authorized to see it We are going to cover option 2 since that is a use case I just ran into.

The current way to connect Meteor into your React App is to use ES6 based components. Meteor has a function called “createContainer” that will send Meteor data into your React component as props instead of “this.data” access. This can make it a bit more complicated if you need to change your subscriptions based on React’s state, but we will talk about the new pattern you will need to use. This is a better pattern long term as you can switch out the top level data injection and re-use all your display logic (say you want to swap out Meteor down the road, or use Redux).