Category Archives: Networking

SSH Tunneling and Proxying

Today I want to talk about the flexibility, security, and convenience of using SSH Tunneling and Proxying to connect to your remote network devices. The SSH tunnel will act as a VPN of sorts to get us inside the network where remote access is otherwise not available. These examples will also wrap the traffic in a layer of security since all SSH tunnel traffic is encrypted. To get started let’s have a look at the diagram below: The laptop is our remote user and the network on the right is the network with some devices that we could like to … Continue reading

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Cisco Wireless AP LED Commands

In the networking realm of things I typically get to play with new and sophisticated technology. Sometimes, however, even the most sophisticated technology requires some really simple changes for some really simple reasons. For example. the other day I was approached about disabling the LEDs on our Cisco access points. Since I was working in the healthcare world at the time it made sense that a request would come through about this particularly since many patient rooms had APs mounted in them. After some quick looking around online I found the answer: Log into the controller and issue the following … Continue reading

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Cisco Configuration “Expect” Backup Script

I was recently tasked with backing up switch configurations automatically. No problem, right? Wrong. There was nothing to spend on this project so it was up to me and whatever I could do with a script. I had made a telnet script in the past but was not crazy about passwords flying around in plain text. I really have very little scripting experience so many of you will find this very easy to understand and follow since there is nothing complicated about my scripting skills.
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Parsing Cisco Show Command Output

If you have done even the basics in networking you have probably used a “show” command at some point on a Cisco networking device. Show commands give us insight into the configuration, performance and issues that face that device. One issue with show commands, however, is that they can be very verbose. Many commands give you way more information than you are looking for and are difficult to get through quickly. Luckily for you and I there are output modifiers to help us parse the output.
I will attempt to teach this short lesson with an example. Say you want to look at all interfaces and see what access lists are applied to them. You could do “show run” and read all of the output until you find what you are looking for.
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