I'm going to write a short off-topic series on a challenge my wife issued to me the other night. We have two turtles in a 55 gallon aquarium, and I can't seem to keep up with the filter cleaning (turtles are like Oscars and Plecos in terms of waste generation, only 1000x worse...well, ok, Oscars are pretty messy, too). I was complaining about the constant filter maintenance, and my wife asked me why I didn't just build out an aquaponics system on top of the aquarium.

This is pretty...

I work on the network devices support team at AWS. We provide troubleshooting support for various network-related devices, such as Cisco ISR/ASR/ASA, Juniper SSG/ISG, Fortigate, etc... most of the troubleshooting revolves around AWS Direct Connect and IPSec.

We have a few network labs at AWS that contain many of the devices we support, however, I've always been more of a "hands-on" kind of guy, so I recently purchased a Cisco ISR and a Cisco ASA (2801 and 5505, respectively)....

Customer calls in, stating he can't get BGP to come up across an IPSec link from a VyOS instance to another region. He explains that this is his first time messing with BGP, and that the session won't establish. We review his configuration, and for a first-timer, I'm really impressed with his understanding of BGP. Clearly this guy has done his homework, as everything, including odd little quirks of BGP, are all accounted for.

"Well, let's sledgehammer the problem. Ping the...

Spent the past 20 minutes troubleshooting an OpenVPN issue.

Problem: OpenVPN client connects, pulls an IPv4 address, but does not get route information. Manually added routes don't allow ping.

Solution: tap devices cannot talk to tun devices, at least not directly/natively. tap devices are layer 2. tun devices are layer 3. 2, no matter how close it gets to 3, is simply not 3. (ARP tries hard to prove otherwise, but as there is no such thing as a L3 header in...

My wife and I homeschool our children with an online school. Our eldest is soon to be a teenager; coupled with her "easily distracted" personality, we've gotten to the point where we have to monitor her during school hours to ensure she isn't getting off track with online games, youtube, etc...

So my wife tasked me with filtering traffic. My initial instinct would be to simply drop web traffic and smile about it, but given that they have online courses I couldn't sledgehammer...