IOS-config-mode VS cmdg

This brings back memories. I used to work at Cisco in the early 2000s.

Unlike many of the places I worked at since, Cisco (atleast the BU where I worked at) had a dedicated team to implement the libraries and tools needed to script/automate the routers via the consoles. It was a library based on TCL/Expect that connected directly to the command line to get things done. It had a core library maintained by the team and an extensions directory that had modules developed by separate teams for their own features. Finally, there was a regression suite that tested complex setups to make sure that everything was performing well. It also had routines to connect to traffic generators. The one we used was from a company called Ixia. The whole thing had regular release cycles and was treated as a first class internal product rather than just a script someone had written. As part of the work I needed to do, I even wrote a little Emacs mode to handle IOS config files https://github.com/nibrahim/IOS-config-mode

I thought this was the standard way of doing things but several of the companies I worked in since didn't have this polished an infrastructure team and it showed.

I don't know if was because of lack of adoption of TCL but several years later (2017 or so), they moved a lot of the tooling from TCL to Python and I actually went back to deliver some trainings to reskill the engineers on the new technologies.

Partly the reason I wrote and use this command line client for GMail: https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg

Also became a fun learning experience about terminals.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg

I wanted to use GMail from a fast cli that used the native gmail API.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/rslurp

I wanted to download concurrently and according to patterns. Ok, so honestly this one probably exists somewhere in a form that I would like, but I couldn't find it.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/sim

I wanted multi-party authorization for sudo, and couldn't find one.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/monotonic_clock

People kept using gettimeofday, so this is part of my compaign against it. (see https://blog.habets.se/2010/09/gettimeofday-should-never-be-...)

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/gtping

I worked in mobile core networks, and wanted a "ping" that used the GTP protocol since that won't be firewalled.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/ind

I wanted my bash scripts to have automatic indentation, while not sacrificing buffering latency and such.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/tlscheck

I wanted a simple tool to audit my TLS certificates for expiry.

https://github.com/google/huproxy

I was travelling to China on vacation and wanted a VPN out that would be unlikely to be blocked by the great firewall. Ok, so there are many VPN-like tools for getting through the GFW. Maybe it was just an excuse for me to write it. Honestly ssh -D would have likely worked just fine. It's being used by the keymaster project now though, so maybe it did something right: https://github.com/Cloud-Foundations/keymaster/blob/master/d...

https://github.com/google/tcpauth

I wanted to lock down SSH to anyone who doesn't have a secret key (and portknocking is usually ridiculous). Why not use TCP MD5 for it? https://github.com/google/tcpauth

Also, aerc. Or something like cmdg for Gmail specifically.