All posts by Daniel

OpenBSD strace equivalent

OpenBSD, I’ve loved you for a long time, but over the last few years, me and you have grown apart. Not due to choice, but due to my career path being deeply entangled with everything associated with Linux.

Thankfully, I recently had the opportunity to bring up an OpenBSD box and set it up from scratch with OpenBSD 4.6.

One of the first issues I encountered had to do with my favorite editor – vi/vim. The problem? The backspace and the arrow keys weren’t working properly and while this is a simple .vimrc fix, I wanted to place the fixes in a global vimrc. On Linux (at least RHEL based distro’s), this can be accomplished by dropping your settings into /etc/vimrc. On OpenBSD though, this is not the case – it is read from a different location. Read More

Share

64 views2 comments

Automating Cisco switch deployment with Perl over Serial

Camels and serial ports

I was recently given the task to write up some scripts to automate the deployment of Cisco switches via a serial port (or whatever else you’d like to call it – console port, rs232 etc.). While at first glance, the process seemed pretty straightforward, I soon ran into a couple of issues – I couldn’t find any quick and dirty way to do this. Following a couple hours of digging, I found just the right solution.

Read More

Share

159 views2 comments

PuTTY for OS X? No thanks.

Many folks coming from the Windows world often ask where they can find the PuTTY client for OS X. While I do not wish to undermine the quality of the client (as it is, quite likely, the best for Windows), there is no such need for it on OS X. Why? This is simple – because all of the functionality that PuTTY offers, such as SSH, Telnet and Serial abilities come bundled with your OS X install. Since OS X is based on UNIX, it comes with a massive array of utilities that can be found across most different UNIX based OS’s and SSH and Telnet is no exception. (If you must install PuTTY on your computer, just read our other article How To Install PuTTY On OS X.) Read More

Share

2,876 views42 comments