
We’re surrounded by technical debt every day. We have a mountain of it sitting in distribution closets and a yard full of it out behind the data center. We make compromises for budget reasons, for technology reasons, and for political reasons. We tell ourselves every time that this is the last time we’re giving in and the next time it’s going to be different. Yet we find ourselves staring at the landscape of technical debt time and time again. But how can we start chipping away at it?
You may think you don’t have any time to work on the technical debt problem. This is especially true if you don’t have the time due to fixing problems caused by your technical debt. The hours get longer and the effort goes up exponentially to get simple things done. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Every minute you spend trying to figure out where a link goes or a how a server is connected to the rest of the pod is a minute that should have been spent documenting it somewhere. In a text document, in a picture, or even on the back of a Continue reading

Nice tool for people who are crafting an artisanal logging system
Hot new tech, including products from CES, add to the growing risk posed by connected devices.
The post Intent-based Networking explained appeared first on Noction.
One of my readers sent me an interestingly sad story as a response to my importance of fundamentals rant. Here it is… enjoy ;)
2017-01-14: Updated with a different viewpoint
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We could see more ARM-based servers in virtualized networks.
Rival Viavi viewed as a possible merger partner.
“We have a cloud and they have a network.”
The partnership deploys VNFs on Juniper's branch routers.
Is networking becoming a commodity? Do we all need to worry about losing our jobs as network engineers because no-one cares about how a commodity is created or provided? Maybe it is time to take a second look at the commodity craze.
In certain situations, I need to connect to a remote network via a bastion host but only have SSH available to me. To get around installing some kind of VPN gateway, the easiest thing to do is to create an SSH tunnel.
In this situation, what happens is that you set up local port-forwarding. Local port numbers are forwarded to the remote host via an SSH tunnel to the intermediate host.
The command format to do this on OSX is:
ssh -C -L <LOCAL-PORT>:<REMOTE-IP>:<REMOTE-PORT> <USERNAME>@<BASTION-HOST>
So for example, I can forward local port 1000 on my Mac to the remote device’s port 23 using this command (sudo has to be used for local ports lower than 1024):
sudo ssh -C -L 1000:10.200.0.1:23 [email protected]
Once authenticated, I can open another terminal window and type:
telnet localhost 1000
and hey-presto, I get connected to a remote router via telnet through an encrypted SSH tunnel! The -C parameter is for compression and isn’t actually necessary.
If you need to create a number of local port-forwards, this can be done in a config file instead. By default SSH reads /etc/ssh/sshd_config for system-wide parameters, and also Continue reading