Way back in the day, I had a need to browse a web service I had running at home - from work. As I didn’t really want to open the service up to every man and his dog (i.e with DST-NAT and Masq on my router) - I decided to run a SOCKS proxy on my work machine, which connects to a VM in my home network via SSH, and can then let me access this stuff - sort of like a budget version VPN. (Note - this was allowed by my employer! Don’t do it if you haven’t asked!)

For some reason, networking in Linux keeps on changing. Not only changing the well known naming scheme for ethernet interfaces (why), but now the way to manually set up IP addressing, VLANs etc in Ubuntu 18 has changed. Gone is the simple to use /etc/networking/interfaces file, and in its place some YAML and a new tool, netplan. Fine..

This post is really a persistent note for me. Every now and then I end up going down the road where I need to administer a Dell server (typically one I can afford for home use, like a Dell R610) - only to find that everything I rely on at work (like having windows/java/etc) is out the door. Here are some steps to allow access to the iDRAC on Dell Rx10 server from a Mac, using Chrome as a browser.

I have spent some time scratching my head on ESXi-based VMX and I thought I would share some experience. This isn’t meant to be a guide, or replace Juniper’s own docs, but to supplement (and help me remember stuff 2 years later).

This is a bit specific, and, like most of my posts - a cheap way for me to remember something next time I need to do it.

I am currently obsessed with network automation. My favourite ‘stack’ at the moment is Ansible, git and the Juniper Ansible libraries. There are a thousand ways to skin this particular cat, but for my current project (enforcing ‘golden config’ across a large number of devices) - this limited number of tools does the job.

As with most cool new tech, there are hundreds of posts and docs, most of which are similar enough to give the illusion of cohesion, but all critically different when it comes to the nitty-gritty, causing confusion and angst. At least, that’s my impression.

So - if you want a Junos Automation machine, ready to attack your network with Python and Ansible, follow along.