This is an exercise I thought of on the drive home from work. Just a task to help give context to the concepts I have been learning. This exercise came from wanting to VPN into my home network. The home network has a dynamic external IP address, which means I need a way to know if that IP has changed. The script IPcheck.py helps solve that problem. It’;s been created to check the current external IP against a stored value and notify by email if the two do not match.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of being able to help vBrownBag produce 106 technical videos over a 4 day period. During the week of OpenStack summit, I was lucky enough to work with some exceptional people, meet old and new friends from the community and all in all have an amazing time. The OpenStack vBrownBag crew consisted of Alastair Cooke, Kyle Ruddy, Emad Younis, Brian Knudtson, Jon Harris, Gurusimran Khalsa (GS) and myself.

Yesterday I decided that I would like to create an AWS instance using python. After not very much searching, I came across Boto3 which is the python SDK for AWS and set to work. Being fairly green with both python and using APIs I felt like this was a bit of learning curve, but worth undertaking. The code for this task is located on GitHub For testing, I have been using Python 3 and the latest Boto3 build as of the 8/05/2016.

 Before we go through my experience with VMUG over the last 12 months, it’s probably a good idea to cover what VMUG is. VMUG is a community for VMware Users and Partners, which has a large focus on providing education, events and a community for it’s members. There are a lot of regional VMUGs around the world for people to join. Each VMUG is locally run, so meeting frequency and formats are likely to vary.

It’s hard to work in the IT industry and not hear about automation on practically a daily basis. For quite a while I always saw automation as something for large companies that are deploying numerous servers compared to the one off file server or DC that I am used to with the clients I deal with. So happily I went along with the notion that this isn’t for me. I was wrong.

For a while now I’;ve taken to listening to podcasts during my commute to and from work. Podcasts have become my primary source of audio in the car for two main reasons; I have to pay attention to what is being said so it helps to take my mind off of the traffic and also I was finding it difficult to stay up to date with IT news etc. The app I use for my podcasts is iCatcher (for iPhone).

One thing I have been hearing a bit of recently is that doing a task at small scale is easier than at large scale. This simply isn’;t true, though it’;s not harder either. Both small and large scale problems have their limitations and difficulties. While not unique to SMB, budget constraints have a huge impact, spending enough to keep it running and stopping there is pretty common. Let’;s face it, pretty no matter who you work for, there is never enough money for IT.

On the 28th of Jan, I got a notification on my phone that episode 396 of the Risky Business podcast was ready to be streamed for my drive home commute. The sponsored interview with Haroon Meer on a free service called Canary Tokens from Thinkst really got my attention. It was said that Canary Tokens were simple to implement service to produce an alert when activated, they could be placed into directory structures, DNS lookup, Word documents etc.

vBrownBag APAC is currently setting up a new series of podcasts for 2016, starting on the 10th of March. The podcasts will be live streamed and recorded at 9 PM NZDST and uploaded to YouTube after the show. We are looking for Admins who would like to present a podcast on a utility that they find invaluable to their day to day operations. The premise to not only demonstrate the features and functionality of the product, but to also explain the organisational use case that it fulfills.

Recently vBrownBag kicked off the APAC podcast with a 4 part series on Cisco’;s SDN solution ACI. Before getting into the details of the show I would like to thank our presenters, Lauren Malhoit @malhoit{.ProfileHeaderCard-screennameLink.u-linkComplex.js-nav} and Carl Niger @carl_niger{.ProfileHeaderCard-screennameLink.u-linkComplex.js-nav} for taking the time to put together some fantastic content and presenting at a local time when most of us would be asleep. The series provided excellent product information on Cisco’;s SDN solution as well a great a technical overview of the components and some of its capabilities.

After reading over RTP this morning I decided to run up a very simple EIGRP setup in GNS3 to help visualise what is happening.  As the image above shows the setup is very straight forward. The link from R4 to R3 was set to 100mbps and R4 to R2 was set to 10mbps. This was simply to adjust the metric and move traffic over to one link and make picking the right link for tracking RTP easier.

I enjoy building test environments to help cement the concepts I read about. In this case it’;s the changes to the source and destination MAC addresses of a frame at layer 2 while it passes through each hop on the way to the final destination. To watch this process I setup wireshark between each hop. The topology was very simple, 2 hosts and 2 routers. 

During my study for my VCP5-DCV certification I found that having a home lab was a huge asset in terms of being able to get a better understanding of the subject matter. Now that I am working towards my CCNA Routing and Switch I feel this will be the case once again. My goal is use the home lab to work on labs as per the study guides I am using and also to have something productive to work on when I don’;t feel like reading through a study guide.