The Null Route

Persistent Static routes - macOS High Sierra

Problem: I've got a mac at work. It's connected to two physically separate networks, one of which has a default route, but the other needs routes when the adapter is plugged in. Surprisingly,

Ubuntu Server 18.04 x64 Deployment

Introduction: It's been a while since I wrote my guide for the deployment of ubuntu 16.04, so I figured I would make one for the latest LTS release: 18.04! Implementation: First,

Cisco

Cisco ACI bits 'n' bobs

Introduction I'm fairly new to ACI, and am coming across new things all the time. Here I will provide quick bits and pieces of things I find which are useful to know and

Docker

Better 'docker stats' output (with Name)

Problem: The docker stats command isn't great - it gives you container ID vs name, which when you have a pretty small deployment like me (~20 containers) you usually know what services you're

Docker

Ghost (blog) migration to 1.0

Introduction: It's been some time since Ghost 1.0 was released, and I've been putting off this day for a while. Essentially the migration strategy I was trying to use wasn't working in

Linux

HAProxy 'home' Load Balancer

Introduction: I've done a few posts in the past about using nginx as a reverse proxy / loadbalancer, however I thought I'd look into HAProxy as a possible alternative to some of the issues

Cisco

Import Certificates into Cisco IOS Router (SSL VPN)

Problem: So I've made a few posts on automating SSL VPN with LetsEncrypt etc etc, however what if you're already using some way of generating certificates? Be it LetsEncrypt or otherwise. Essentially these

Alexa

Windows PC Wake up / Shut down - Automated

Problem: I've just got an Amazon Echo. As the previous post suggests I've got it talking to Jenkins, so anything that can be done in Jenkins Alexa can now call, which is rather

Docker

Amazon Echo - Integration to Jenkins

Problem: So if you've ever dealt with an Amazon Echo (Alexa) you'll probably know that it's pretty awesome. There's all sorts of things you can do. As far as I could tell there

Cisco

Cisco IR829 Tinkering

Introduction: The IR829 router is a rather interesting beast, it has 4G, wireless, GPS, an accelerometer, water resistant, fanless, gigabit switchports + WAN and vehicle ignition system features. It's also got the ability to

Python

Netmiko Python package on Alpine

Problem: For a current project I was looking to use netmiko to administrate a Cisco router - and given my natural affinity for Docker I'm planning to use a container to run the

Linux

Reset VMware vCenter root password

Problem: The vCenter appliance requires a complex password for the root user, which of course you'll forget after 5 minutes if you're just spinning something up for test purposes. Naturally what then happens

Docker

Shorten & Alias 'docker ps' output

Problem: The default 'docker ps' command has a rather verbose output. This (especially for me) is due to the sheer number of ports associated to containers. As a result, I need a super

Sky Fiber Broadband with a Cisco Router (897VA)

Problem: I've written a post previously of how to get sky ADSL broadband working with a Cisco router HERE however this particular implementation just got upgraded to Fiber (or VDSL). So, I've had

Linux

Ghost blog account recovery

Problem: Naturally I'd never be so silly to forget my own password....however Billy is not so sensible and forgot his password. For some reason (I've not even bothered to look) the forgot

Boiling Water: Kettle vs Microwave

Introduction: Now this is a rather unusual post, however I consider myself scientific and myself and a couple of colleagues (to those of you who know me reading this - I am of

Misc

Online email obfuscation

Problem: This blog has been a great place to brainstorm and share my ideas and activities with the world however it's always bugged me slightly that I've had no way to get feedback

Nginx

Correct IP in nginx logs behind reverse proxy / load balancer

Problem: So I finally got a log solution I like working properly. Logs in the load-balancer are correct in terms of their external IP. The problem is when I look at the webserver

Linux

Nginx Reverse Proxy based on user-agent

Problem: I run a 'load balancer' at home. The first thing I hear when I tell people this is something along the lines of 'what on earth are you running if you need

Linux

Replacing cron jobs with Jenkins

Problem: I've got quite a few servers kicking around, in various different locations and usually doing various different things. Across all of these servers there's always cron jobs set up to do small

Linux

Automating IOS WEBVPN LetsEncrypt SSL Certificates

Problem: In a previous post I addressed the problem of getting an SSL certificate from LetsEncrypt onto a Cisco IOS router. The problem we face now is that these certificates expire frequently, and

Linux

Cisco IOS SSL WebVPN with LetsEncrypt

Problem: A while back I wrote a post on SSL VPN for IOS routers here: http://blog.dchidell.com/2016/03/21/cisco-ios-ssl-webvpn/ This post goes into detail of using the Certificate Authority

Linux

Fixing "'no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group1-sha1" on Mac

Problem: This is going to be a lovely short post. Here's the issue: dchidell@dchidell-mac:~$ ssh admin@1.1.12.40 Unable to negotiate with 1.1.12.40 port 22: no matching

Docker

Handy Docker Scripts

Introduction: Here we go, yet another docker post! I'm going to keep this one short and simply use it as a repository to store some bash scripts I've written to automate some docker

VMware

vCenter 6.0 Appliance Multi-NIC

Introduction: Occasionally it's useful to connect vCenter to multiple networks simultaneously. Often this requirement comes from in-band (IB) vs out-of-band (OOB) networking where some provisioning or automation tool requires access to vCenter. The