IOS-config-mode VS ppp_thing

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.

I wrote a PPPoE client with failover so I can keep the session even when one of my gateways fails or is rebooted (this lets me do regular maintenance without interrupting my internet connection); I put it on github[1], but I doubt anyone will use it. I hope there are few people left with the scourge that is PPPoE, and my OS choice means many people would need to switch OSes to use it, so yeah. Also, I don't care to make it easy to use or to promote it, really. (I've mentioned it once or twice and did a Show HN that got less than ten votes, which I kind of expected).

I've also got my personal (network) monitoring software, some 'IoT' stuff to capture temperature and humidity data around my house, and I'm working on a ESP32 based alarm clock pulling data from iCalendar.

[1] https://github.com/russor/ppp_thing

I just published https://github.com/russor/ppp_thing which lets me (and maybe you) failover my PPPoE session between two FreeBSD hosts, so I can do regular maintenance without losing my IP or impacting TCP sessions.

I used to let my DSL modem handle PPPoE and NAT, so failover was easy, but found out fragmented IPv6 crashed the leased modem, and the replacement modem also sucks, so bridge mode + a custom PPPoE client (but from netgraph pieces) it is. Sadly useful in 2021, because PPPoE is somehow still a thing.