This site has run on WordPress since basically forever. As of this week, it doesn’t anymore. Everything you’re reading is now a static Hugo site, built from Markdown, served by nginx, with no PHP and no database anywhere in the stack. Here’s why I did it, what actually moved, and how I used Claude Code as a pair programmer for most of the heavy lifting.

Why bother

Let’s be honest about how it got this bad: I didn’t keep up with it. I know. Servers don’t rot on their own — you stop patching them, stop upgrading them, and a few years later you’re staring at a stack that’s aged out from under you. The old droplet had quietly rotted underneath a site that still worked fine. Ubuntu 18.04 — EOL since 2023. PHP 7.4 — EOL since 2022, with no apt-upgrade path to anything newer (the PPA I’d have needed was frozen). MySQL 5.7 — also EOL. WordPress itself was current; everything under it wasn’t, and there was no clean patching path left, just a slow accumulation of risk on a box facing the public internet.

If you’ve ever had to move a large session library from SecureCRT to SuperPutty, you know the pain — there’s no built-in migration path, and manually re-entering dozens (or hundreds) of sessions is a miserable afternoon. I wrote SCRT_2_SPUTTY to handle it automatically. Point it at your SecureCRT XML export, and it spits out a ready-to-import SuperPutty XML file. No third-party libraries, no configuration files — just Python and a single command.

If you run a self-hosted Ubiquiti UniFi network — whether it’s a home lab, small business, or multi-site setup — you know the UniFi dashboard is great for real-time monitoring but falls short when you want a clean summary you can save, share, or review later. I built UniFi Network Health Report to fill that gap: a Python tool that connects to your controller and generates a standalone HTML report covering everything that matters.

If you work with Juniper hardware and have never used the Juniper Port Checker, you are missing out on a really useful tool. It is part of the Juniper Pathfinder suite and it gives you a visual representation of the front panel of a device and lets you configure port speeds to validate that your planned configuration is actually supported by the hardware. No more digging through data sheets trying to figure out what happens to adjacent ports when you change a speed.

I have been meaning to put together some network tools for a while now, and I finally got around to it. I added a new Network Tools section to the site with eight tools that I find myself needing on a regular basis. They all run in the browser – nothing gets sent to a server, they either do the math locally or call a public API directly.

This week I am in the Juniper Campus Networks with Mist AI ( JCMA ) course and going over the labs. I ran into a problem where the EX4400-24T et-0/1/0 and et-1/1/1 ports did not appear in in the Junos configuration nor the Mist portal. The configuration was in the portal via the templates, but the ports did not exist on the switch.

I have seen similar conditions as these ports can also be used for the Virtual Chasis (VC) ports. What I did find interesting is that the normal way I have always changed VC-Ports on Junos did not work.

First, let us look at the vc-ports on this EX4400-24T:

{master:0}
lab@ex2> show virtual-chassis vc-port 
fpc0:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interface   Type              Trunk  Status       Speed        Neighbor
or                             ID                 (mbps)       ID  Interface
PIC / Port
1/0         Configured         -1    Down         50000
1/1         Configured         -1    Down         50000
1/2         Configured         -1    Down         50000
1/3         Configured         -1    Down         50000

As you can see, we have 4 VC-Ports configured on Pic 1 – Ports 0-3.

Soon, many of us will be on an airplane heading to Las Vegas for Cisco Live 2022. So I felt that it might be good to put out some final information before we head out. Below you will find some info on the Cisco Events App, Health and Safety info, as well as NetVet reception updates.

Cisco recently updated its Cisco Events application for Cisco Live 2022, this is a must-have application for an attendee. This application is your go-to for everything CIsco Live, as you can see from the images below, it has all the relevant information you need – the Session Catalog, the All Sessions section has your Schedule for the sessions you have signed up for as well.

The other week I had the privilege of participating in Tech Field Day Exclusive with Cisco 2022. One of the presentations that I enjoyed was the talk on the C9300X. I think this is because I am currently working heavily with them on a current project

As I said, the Cisco Catalyst 9300 is a switch family that I am familiar with due to my current work environment. I have deployed all different models from C9300-48U-A, C9300-48UN-A, to the C9300-48UXM-A. They have been a reliable switch from my experience, albeit a bit of pain due to the interface naming differences between the models. ( that is another blog post altogether )

I am honored to be welcomed back to Tech Field Day Exclusive with Cisco scheduled on 16-17 March 2022. It will be a live-streamed event that you can watch over on the Tech Field Day site during the event, or on their YouTube channel shortly after.

The schedule for the event is as follows:

See you there!

It should be safe to say that most of us have had a tough time these past two years, no matter what our view of things – the world has changed around us. We all have been learning to adapt, understand, and cope with what has happened. I am sure that we are all looking to get back to some normalcy in our lives.

“Troubles, they may come and go, but good times, they're the gold.”
― Dave Matthews Band

In the past one of our normalcies has been an event called Cisco Live – or Nerd Camp as some of us have come to affectionately call it. It is a place where you gather with friends who share the same passions, a place where you make new acquaintances, and ultimately a place where we learn new technologies together for the networking world.

Our last in-person event was in 2019 in San Diego, CA – since then Cisco Live has been forced to go online only due to the changes in the world Granted we still got our dose of new technology learning from a firehose with the online sessions, but they are just not the same as being in a classroom setting listening to the speaker. Online sessions are missing the human touch that we get by being in person at the event, by asking questions in the session, by conversing with the speakers after the session, and ultimately by connecting to our peers in the session. Online sessions are missing the interactions we can gain when we are together.

“I'll lean on you and you lean on me and we'll be okay.”
― 
Dave Matthews Band