Somebody please get this engineer a CLI

Monday, 01 January 2018 / Published in Networking, Personal
This post is a little war story about a time I helped out a friend of mine. My favourite movie for 2017 was John Wick Chapter 2. Not quite as good as the first movie but still awesome. In one of the  scenes Laurence Fishburn shouts “Somebody, please! get this man a gun” Just prior to Christmas a

Implementing Ubiquiti Unifi into the home network

Tuesday, 28 November 2017 / Published in Lab, Networking, Security
This post details my observations and experiences Implementing Ubiquiti Unifi into the home network. If you intend to use Unifi devices exclusively then the kit will work straight out the box with little configuration required, no point in reading this post TL;DR. On the other hand if you have a fairly elaborate home network which

StarTech USB To RS232 Serial Adaptor

Tuesday, 27 June 2017 / Published in Networking
It can be tricky finding a reliable USB to serial adaptor. I’ve recently brought a new as I’ve replaced my laptop and my old adaptor was not compatible with Windows 10. Fortunately I found one that works on my first purchase, the StarTech USB to serial Adaptor. The Adaptor was recognised by Windows 10 with

Automating the reboot of my home cable modem

Friday, 27 January 2017 / Published in Automation, Networking
This post details my approach to automating the reboot of my home cable modem. Up until recently my ISP has been extremely reliable and in over 14 years I’ve been a customer with them I could count on my hand the number of times I’d experienced issues. For the last week the service has been

Pictures of the home network lab

Wednesday, 31 August 2016 / Published in Lab, Networking, Personal
  The Net Assured DC the physical medium to a truly virtual world

The Home Networking Lab

Wednesday, 29 June 2016 / Published in Automation, Lab, Networking, Personal, Security
Here is an overview of the Home networking lab setup. You might ask why even have a home lab these days? You can build a fairly grown up enterprise grade topology using virtualization? Agreed, especially if you have high spec workstation or choose a cloud provider for the compute. Why I built a home lab

Project APC PowerChute Network Shutdown VMware Esxi

Sunday, 22 May 2016 / Published in Automation, Lab, Networking
I’ve just completed a project for my home network / lab to automate the graceful shutdown of my VMware Esxi hosts.  Project Configure APC Powerchute Network Shutdown (PCNS) objective was to solve a problem with accounting for input power failure to my UPS. We rarely experience utility power outages but we had an incident recently

Weekly Podcast Roll

Wednesday, 02 March 2016 / Published in Networking, Security
Keeping relevant in this industry can be challenging. With the DevOps, SDN, public cloud and insert acronym here revolutions, everything is moving so quickly consuming information can feel like drinking from a fire hose. A strategy of mine is to listen to industry related podcast’s both security and data networking. Podcasts are a great way

Implementing Vyos routers into the home lab

Sunday, 21 February 2016 / Published in Lab, Networking, Security
[UPDATE] My home lab now runs Palo Alto VM100 virtual firewalls with a Unifi Security Gateway. I’ll leave this post up for anyone who may be interested in my experiences working with VyOS[/UPDATE] I’ve just completed a project implementing VyOS routers into the home lab. In this post I’ll detail why and how I use VyOS. VyOS

Technical Debt

Sunday, 03 January 2016 / Published in Networking, Security
I’ve spent many years working in operational roles supporting complex architectures. Almost everyone one of them had a high degree of Technical debt.  Network architectures that have been poorly designed, do not scale well or too complicated to support without an armada of highly trained and skilled engineers. This picture I came across on twitter