In this post I will cover how I use actionable notifications within Home Assistant. Using push notifications with the Home Assistant iOS App you can setup some really cool triggers within the system. Below is a list of the technology used at the time of writing: Home Assistant - Version 0.60.1 Apple iPhone X and iPhone 7 Apple iOS 11.2.2 I have two actionable notifications that get used most often:

This is a quick post to document the process I use to auto-log SecureCRT sessions. I like to automatically log all sessions that I open, just so I have a record of all my keystrokes. It also helps when doing discovery operations so that I do not have to repeat logins to collect information that I may not have felt was important previously. This post will lay out how to setup aut logging for all sessions globally.

Update 20190819: The public instance of the Staticman API is broken with no clear line-of-sight on when or if it will be repaired. Reference issue #307. I am now running my own Staticman instance in Heroku using the suggestions from VincentTam. I am using the master branch and integrating PR #285. VincentTam did a good write up on all of these things in a few places: Issue #296 & VincentTam’s blog on hosting your own instance of Staticman.

In this post I hope to quickly cover how I use pfSense to provide easily reachable management networks for simulations within VIRL. Below is a list of the technology I use in this lab environment: pfSense SG-1000 running 2.4 BETA Cisco VIRL_ — Core 0.10.29.12_ VMWare ESXi 5.5 Update 1 Generic VLAN Aware Layer 2 Switching I will not go through the entire installation of Cisco VIRL. I am just going to go through what I do in my personal environment to allow the FLAT & FLAT2 networks to be routable to the world.

Quick Note All of the conclusions below were based off of my individual findings dealing with Vue and my cable provider. But, I used some parts of pfSense that a lot of people talk about and I thought it would be good to put it on paper for others to find. For all of the pfSense examples below I am using pfSense 2.4.0-BETA on an Netgate SG-1000. The Issue When the decision to cut the cord it was with much excitement about the upcoming experimenting with different content providers.

Quick Note I thought I would make a quick post about how I reset the toner counters on my brother HL-3170CDW. I find myself having to search for these steps every few months. The Request: I love my brother HL-3170CDW printer (CLICK HERE). It performs great and always works for us. The one thing I do not like is buying toner cartridges…and I have yet to do so! I have owned this printer since August 13, 2013 and have yet to replace the toner even though I use it regularly.

The Request I have a client with a data center, a headquarters/DR site, and a lot of branches spread out all over the world with Internet connectivity. They are currently using static IPSEC Internet facing VPNs to connect to their data center and HQ environemts, but the company is hitting a growth spurt and they are quickly realizing this solution is becoming difficult to scale and manage with their limited in-house IT staff.

The Request: Now that Cisco has included SSL VPN licensing as part of the 15.3(3)M IOS I have had multiple clients ask about turning on the capability and reaching back into Active Directory for authentication. The Solution: The equipment I used to lab this solution: Cisco 881 w/ IOS 15.3(3)M3 (10.0.1.238) Windows Server 2008 R2 (10.0.1.231) First we will go through the steps to configure the RADIUS server on Windows so we have access to Active Directory for authentication.