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Stihl 362-CM

 When you need to cut wood, fast. These are totally not my own photos. I need to take some next time I'm at the lake house with this beast.
Recent posts

Yaesu FT-3DR

 Started with an AnyTone AT-D878UV , but returned it in favor of a  Yaesu FT-3DR .

YSF Reflector

After earning my ham radio technician license on 10/28/2020, I dove head first into the hobby. One of the things that interests me in particular is digital modes and packet radio. At the recommendation of a colleague, and many folks on the Internet, I picked up an  OpenSpot3  hotspot. This hotspot is very capable, and is a good fit for my C4FM based Yaesu radios. I made the rounds with AmericaLink and ZombieNet, but initially had no idea these were not actually Wires-X rooms, but rather, other entry points accessible to hotspots that were being bridged to their native existence. Ok, got it, I think. In essence, my first visit to the digital ham world was via my local clubs dual-mode (FM & C4FM digital) repeater. Armed with the frequency and tone info from  RepeaterBook , and fumbling my way through learning to program my new  FT3DR , I was speaking digital. This repeater in particular is part of a set of repeaters in my general geography, which are all integrated via a device cal

Quickly Triaging Cisco Networks

In my job, I am commonly tasked with looking at misbehaving or underperforming data center, campus, and wide-area networks. It’s no secret that this can be a difficult task, often exacerbated by lack of context, old (no?) documentation, lack of access, and time criticality. I’ve come up with the following set of show commands that I can run, or a customer can run on my behalf, on key components in the environment to get my bearings and start developing hypotheses quickly. I typically encounter Cisco ISR, ASR, Catalyst and Nexus in my travels, and this configlet runs the gamut across some different capabilities and CLI syntax. https://gist.github.com/craigbruenderman/5b73d307ea17e7e3b31c012ab68ccda2

Using the Cisco SD-WAN (Viptela) API

I’ve been working with the Cisco SD-WAN (formerly Viptela) products since about March of 2018. Now that I have a pretty good feel for the product and its capabilities and caveats, I’ve been toying with its REST API for the last few weeks. At the moment, there are no published SDK’s for working with this API. So, to avoid the yak shaving of dealing directly with REST resources, I began to write a Python SDK. I’m first tackling the readers functions that are useful to me via GET methods, and then I’ll start to sprinkle in provisioning and updating methods. Have a look at my  Viptela-Tool  Github Project, but be gentle - I am not a professional software developer.

Automating Velocloud Deployment on AWS

Intro I've been working various flavors of SD-WAN for some time - arguably going back to my DMVPN days. The hotness these days seems to be around Velocloud, Viptela (Cisco SD-WAN), and SilverPeak. Today I want to focus on Velocloud, and specifically, what it takes to get a virtual Velocloud edge deployed and functioning in AWS. Head over here if you need background on the Velocloud solution. Counter to the spirit of gross marketing oversimplification, I've used a baker's dozen different tools and stacked up enough TLA's to give myself a nosebleed. Velocloud has its own share of nouns, and AWS adds to that plenty more technical debt concepts to make it interesting. It was quite a struggle to get all this going from scratch, so it seemed like a good idea to capture it in Terraform in order to stand up / tear down on-demand, and capture as many of the touch points I could in code. So strap in, it's time Terraform time. Demo Goal We're going