For the ten years that I have been a working professional, I’ve been blessed with a variety of jobs. Everything from photographer to aircraft mechanic. I never really knew what I wanted to do when I grew up (and still don’t, to a certain degree), but it became obvious after my first few years in the working world that I was meant to work in some capacity making computers do amazing things.
My first “real” job was working as a Linux System Administrator on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. I supported a group of developers running RHEL 5 on their workstations writing code that ultimately ran on servers also running RHEL 5. It was amazing! I learned so much during that time using RHEL as my day to day operating system, both on the server and desktop.
I’ve been putting this off for a while, but I finally decided to take the plunge to migrate my 34,000+ photo Aperture library to Lightroom1. I shoot RAW, so the size of my library on disk is about 417GB. Lots of data to migrate, hence my reluctance to make the move.
One other reason I waited this long (besides sheer laziness) is I wanted to wait for the Aperture to Lightroom migration tools and processes to mature a bit. Adobe includes an Aperture import plug-in with Lightroom, and I am very thankful for that. While I wish it had a few more options, it’s far better than nothing.
I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with VyOS1, the really amazing open source2 Linux based router operating system. A co-worker of mine showed it to me when we needed a capable router in our development environment and we didn’t feel like waiting for finance to approve a Cisco purchase. I have to admit I didn’t quite get it at first. Linux is an OS, not a router! That’s what IOS3 is for! But after digging into it a bit for a budget constrained side project, I’m totally hooked. And I learned, unequivocally, that Linux can function as a very capable router.
One of the oddities about VyOS is the show configuration command doesn’t produce copy/pastable output. This was initially frustrating to me as someone who is accustomed to the way IOS, ASA OS, and NX-OS work: what you type on the command line is exactly what gets put in the running config. And you can copy and paste bits from a saved config to reuse those settings in other devices.
To get similar behavior out of VyOS, run show configuration commands. You can parse this using our friend the pipe character (|) and the match command followed by a pattern4 like so:
show configuration commands | match interfaces
I wrote a simple script5 to save the running configuration to date stamped file. This could probably get fancier and scp it somewhere, but I just put it on the router itself in my home directory and grab it using an SFTP client.
VyOS Backup
1234
#!/bin/vbashsource /opt/vyatta/etc/functions/script-template
run show configuration commands > $HOME/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(hostname).txt
Happy routing! And don’t forget to always backup your config!
I use “Vyatta”, “VyOS”, and “EdgeRouter” interchangeably, for better or for worse.↩
Well, it’s technicallyno longer open source since Brocade bought them. But VyOS and EdgeRouter are healthy open source forks. That’s what I’ve been using.↩
I spend a lot of my professional working life using a serial terminal to configure routers, switches, and servers. Serial terminal applications on OS X were always a mixed bag. Most of the ones that came up a lot in searches haven’t been updated in ages. Add to that the fact that OS X has a mixed history with driver1 support for USB to serial devices and you have a perfect storm of frustration and the one area where Windows was actually a better OS choice2
Serial is an overwhelmingly great serial terminal. It includes drivers! It’s just a serial terminal, not a kitchen sink app. It does one thing well. And I love it. If you spend any amount of time in a serial terminal, Serial is the app you’ve been waiting for.
This is the only driver I found that worked. Well worth the price.↩
PuTTY is the serial/telnet/SSH client most popular on Windows. It’s terrible but gets the job done, unlike most terminal emulators on OS X before Serial came along.↩
I spend most of my waking hours staring at text, either writing code or in a terminal. Before I made my living as a sysadmin, I spent years working in graphic design and publishing. I love typography, and I read text on screens all day, and I pay close attention to the typography I encounter1.
For many years, my monospaced font of choice was Inconsolata. It is an excellent typeface that I have used every single day for more than five years, but Hack has eeked it out as my new daily typeface. I find Hack to be slightly more legible than Inconsolata, though Hack Bold is a hair too heavy to my eyes.
Besides being pleasantly legible, Hack has an impressive collection of 1,500+ glpyhs, free CDN hosting, detailed instructions for self hosting, and an active open source project. I highly recommend you check it out.
From the moment that I fully grokked the power of idempotence, I immediately saw the potential for Ansible as theSTIG compliance tool. When I worked as a sysadmin for the US Navy, I spent a good deal of my time making sure systems were hardened appropriately according to those guidelines. I used a combination of kickstart files and shell scripts to the get the job done because I found the existing tools, SRR scripts and Gold Disk1, pretty useless.
Today I tried on the Apple Watch at my local Apple Store. I booked the appointment about two hours beforehand, which I was happy to find it so easy to get an appointment. I went to the store and was quickly greeted by friendly staff there to help me try on any Apple Watch they had available. I must say I was quite surprised to see the Apple Watch Eddition on display (not for try-on) in Richmond, VA of all places. It’s startling how two tiny little Apple Watches sitting in the display case are easily worth more than all the cars I own combined.