Guides

Long-form study guides and field notes, grouped by discipline. New disciplines are added as the writing accumulates.

• Fortinet

  NSE4 study guides and field notes from FortiGate in production — configuration walkthroughs, exam preparation, and the diagnostic commands that come up most often under pressure.

• AI

  Lessons from building this site with Claude — MCP self-hosting patterns, tool design for LLMs, prompt-driven authoring, and the safety rails that make write access tolerable.

• Linux

  Networking and security notes for engineers who already live on the command line — packet capture with tcpdump, network emulation with NETEM, namespace-based router labs, iptables-to-nftables migration, and SSH hardening with certificates.

• Cisco

  Routing, switching, and the operational habits that hold up when the network is on fire.

• VeloCloud

  Arista (formerly VeloCloud) SD-WAN — spoke and hub topologies, Enhanced HA wiring, dual-DIA underlay design, and OSPF/BGP integration on the LAN side.

• Python

  Python for network engineers — Netmiko in practice, parsing show output with TextFSM and Genie, NAPALM vs raw CLI, scaling with Nornir, and packaging your scripts as polished pip-installable tools with Click and Rich.

• Personal

  Writing from outside the day job — study notes from non-technical certifications, hobby deep dives, and anything else that earns its place here. Currently: the RYA Marine Radio (SRC) syllabus, worked through topic by topic.