Clay Curtis

I am a network/systems engineer and I am always looking for ways to improve myself in work and in life. Feel free to contact me @ccurtis584 on Twitter.

📍 Florida, USA https://www.linkedin.com/in/clay584/

ChatGPT on Generating Cisco Configurations

In this interaction, I just wanted a simple Cisco IOS-XE configuration for an Internet-facing router that does NAT overload to provide the LAN with Internet access. Then, just for fun, had it convert it to NX-OS. Me Write a Cisco IOS-XE configuration for a router that acts as a home

ChatGPT on Makefiles

In this exchange I needed to make a Makefile. I didn't have much experience with them, so I used ChatGPT and had a functional (and optimized) Makefile in 15 minutes. This probably saved me a couple of hours of reading documentation and trial and error. Me Show me a hello

ChatGPT on Netconf & Yang

In this exchange I was wanting to know how best to utilize the open source Python packages for working with Netconf and YANG. I asked to compare and contrast them and make working examples for me to review. This easily saved many hours of research and testing. Me Write a

Exploring Link Aggregation Hashing Algorithms in Python

Last week I was stuck in the never ending death scroll on Twitter, and actually came across something pretty interesting. It was a post on Twitter from Christopher Hart [https://twitter.com/_ChrisJHart] deep diving into Equal-Cost Multi-Pathing (ECMP). In this thread he gets into the details of how a

RUN DFZ - Bringing the Internet to a Lab Near You

One of the things I have wanted to test over the years was having realistic Internet BGP data inside of a lab network. Traditionally this would entail peering with a real router in production. I have never been in an environment that would be OK with this, so I always

Network Automation Text Parsing Landscape

Whether you like it or not, the networking industry is stuck with (and will be for many years to come), vendors and devices with no API, inconsistent interfaces, differing configuration and runtime CLI formats. This means that as much as you hate screen-scraping and regex, it's here to stay. In

The New CCIE Capture the Flag Competition @ Cisco Live

At Cisco Live this year in Las Vegas, a coworker (Paul Giblin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulgiblin/] Twitter: @dreamlessod) and I decided to attended a new kind of event hosted by Cisco. The event was titled "Cisco Capture the Flag: A Full-Stack, Team-Based Competition". The competition was a structured

Reclaiming Public IP Addresses Using Server Name Indication

Have you have ever been in a situation where you have been given a block of addresses by your Internet provider and you have exhausted that space by publishing services to the Internet? Yea, me too and it sucks. The typical solution would be to get a larger block from

Line-Rate Flow Capture to ELK Stack

Introduction In certain environments it is necessary to get flow data from different places in your network for compliance or security in general. Recently I ran across a situation in which the native flow gerenators within the Cisco Nexus platform were only able to do 1 in 1000 sampling due

ELK Stack for Network Operations [RELOADED]

Update This is an update to my original article [https://www.jcc.sh/elk-for-network-operations/] about ELK for Network Operations. This is built on the latest version of ELK (Elasticsearch 1.5, Logstash 1.5.0.rc2, and Kibana 4) on Centos 7. What Is The ELK Stack? ELK stack is