In late 2020 I decided to do a slight career shift from working in the enterprise world (Financials, Small Businesses) to the ISP space. An ISP (Internet Service Provider) is how consumers and businesses access the internet. If you are reading this, you are going through one of many ISPs. I am now on the other side of the fence, and it has been a wild ride! It really is amazing to see how the internet works and what “it” is.

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 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!

MacOS has a few locations that start programs up on boot (called agents and daemons in macOS). If your Mac seems slower, this might be a cause, a bunch of background services running for programs you don’t use often enough. There are also programs that install themselves everywhere and just deleting the application will not remove them. We will walk through all the directories that an application can hide in.

In this guide I will show Python code that will use HTTP GET requests on the Cisco APIC / ACI system and pull data. This will let you get information from the APIC, and display it in a better way. There are many things missing from the GUI (mostly on the reporting front) that you can create with some basic Python scripting. There are two formatting types to get data in and out of the APIC: JSON and XML.

I am going to run through a quick procedure to make the downloadable Cisco CUCM ISO images bootable. When you download them they are non-bootable for some reason. Use this at your own risk, and you must have a support contract to use any Cisco products. I am not liable for anything you do or mess up! Cisco is nice enough to include the boot options and ISOLINUX files and configuration necessary to boot it.

I have been struggling with this question: Where should I live? Close to work? Close to Friends? Close to things to do, close to hikes, close to biking trails? All of these go into a decision, if you have children a huge part of that is schools and a younger neighborhood. I don’t have to worry about that. A bunch of those questions are personal issues that you need to decide on how much time is spent on each.

I have been on an email cleanse lately, so going back and deleting old emails that there is no reason to keep. Over the years I have been quite good at labeling anything that is keep-worthy, but a few can slip through the cracks. Here is a simple search you can run inside your gmail box that shows all the emails you can look through and delete. Search for this to find anything that doesn’t have a label, isn’t in trash, your inbox nor drafts.

There is a image search feature that can be incredibly useful. It is called a reverse image search, and its is scarily accurate. Basically you can upload a photo or give Google the URL (a link) to a photo online and it will search for images that are the same or similar. To use it, goto: https://images.google.com Click the camera icon at the far right of the search box. Your options are Paste the URL (if you can find the picture link directly online) or upload a local picture.

I have been on a power reduction kick lately to see how low I can get my monthly bill. Currently it is a perfect time of year in Phoenix, so we don’t need AC nor heat. One tactic I use when traveling is to just turn off all of the circuits when I leave for more than a day. Do this right at the circuit breaker and all those “vampire” devices will go away.

This is a great story I see on the net, wanted to re-post it. Sums up quite a bit about life! A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them. “Not very long,” answered the Mexican. “But then, why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?” asked the American.