Hello/Salut/Hoi/Hallo,

If you landed here, then you probably want to learn a bit about the person behind it.
Let me try and make a nice introduction then.

I’m Mihai, a Customer Solutions Architect, former Network/Systems/Security/whatever falls upon my hands engineer, a techie person always eager to learn more and expand his knowledge.

Wait, wait…what does this really mean ?

I am a deep dive techie that wanted to also learn a bit about how a company and the sales process works so I reoriented myself toward a more mixed role (technical PreSales and its various names across the industry spectrum).

Tech side experience

I work on a daily basis with various Clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Alibaba) and went through the whole spectrum of technologies like Linux (lately also a bit of eBPF), FreeBSD/OpenBSD, Solaris, Cisco (6500, 7600, ASR9K, Nexus, UCS), Juniper (MX, QFX, Contrail), Security (Linux based firewalls, ASA, SRX, penetration testing / trying out vulnerabilities in API of services or exploits and patching accordingly), Virtualization (VMWare, KVM) and Containers (Docker, Kubernetes, Openshift).

I’m also fascinated with seeing how a blackbox solution works (this means breaking into it, seeing how it’s built, tracing its logic and most fun…finding where programmers cut corners in implementation as a consequence of strict timelines and sales push).

Despite being able to read code, reverse engineer it, change it or adapt it to my needs I don’t see myself as a programmer, albeit ChatGPT & Bard make programming seem easy nowadays. => Intent based programming

Hobbies

• Hiking
• Badminton
• Cooking, albeit sometimes it ends up with smoke signals
• Travelling to non-touristic places, learning about the culture, customs, traditions around the world
  (still wanting to reach Buthan at some point in my life)

Self improvement courses

• Financial Education / Passive income course + coaching
• NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programing) course + bootcamp
• Public Speaking course

Languages I speak

• Romanian and sometimes being a grammar freak
• English
• German
• French
• Italian

Books I’ve read

• Hoi, your Swiss German survival guide (Sergio J. Lievano, Nicole Egger) :)
• How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Dale Carnegie)
• Amp it UP (Frank Slootman)
• From Strength to Strength (Arthur C. Brooks)
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Mark Manson)
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
• Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey A. Moore)
• Launch (Jeff Walker)
• The Wisdom of Insecurity (Alan Watts)
• The Qualified Sales Leader (John McMahon)
• Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (Noah Goldstein’s, Steve Martin’s and Robert Cialdini)
• Influence Science and Practice (Tom Peters)
• Negotiation Genius (Deepak Malhotra, Max Bazerman)
• How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie)
• Why we sleep (Matthew Walker)
• The Warren Buffett Way (Robert Hagstrom)

What will basically be around here?

Anything in the lines of:

• Cloud/MultiCloud
• Network / Systems Engineering
• Openshift / Openstack / virtualization / datacenter topics
• Security (after some sleepless nights I passed the Offensive Security OSCE)
• Reverse engineering products, solutions, Linux stuff
• Other topics (I did my own Romanian automated Sour Cabbage solution using a pump, a Raspberry PI, a Relay Board and Home Assistant)

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Welcome to my first non-work related article and to my curiosity of building an automated installation for making sour cabbage. To those that never came across this, it’s what we use you in Romania for 2 purposes:

• making minced meat rolls we call “sarmale” (the Turkish call them sarma and the Greeks dolma)
  (spoiler alert: Sarmale)
• making sour soups we call “ciorba” or bors (do not confuse with the Russian borsh that despite sounding the same is a completely different dish)

The sour juice resulting from the fermentation you can also drink on empty stomach. Beware though..depending on your stomach you might feel that you are getting purged :)

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This article is part of a bigger document that I wrote for myself with notes about Cisco ACI, Openshift, HP Synergy, 3PAR integration and contains the part I found most challenging considering I learned it from 0 in a rather constraining time interval and with some pressure.

As such I felt the need to document it and do a sort of braindump in order to avoid reinventing the wheel in the future in case I start forgetting.

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You know those moments when you need to connect to a corporate VPN and all the steps and clicks are just getting terribly annoying? Well I went through the same phase and decided to write something to make my life a tad easier.

Setup:

• Cisco Anyconnect
• After clicking on Connect you get a username and password prompt
• Password is the token generate inside MobilePASS app (that runs on the Mac and not on the phone:) )
• MobilePASS app has a token registered inside of it and synced with your employer called generically “My Token”

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I’ll keep this one simple and put here two schemas that I found on the Internet for the concept of redo and undo logs in Oracle. I don’t know about other people but I work must easier with schemas and a few words rather than 100 pages long documents filled with just text.

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What this is? Pretty simple…Juniper started off automating stuff via SLAX, something that did not get too much traction and then Python took the lead in front of it. It is an XML/Xpath based language and for simple things you can find it pretty useful and not so complicated to learn. What the script below does is effectively enabling a MIC upon its insertion into an MX5. Previously someone from operations would have to go manually on the device and enable it.

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A customer asked me at some point if we could evaluate how the CoPP DDOS automated filters on a Juniper MX are triggered and how fast they respond to different types of packets. As such I needed to craft custom traffic. I was not very good at coming up with it for Ostinato or Spirent so I used Scapy to craft the packet. Afterward I took the packet hexdump and input it into Spirent / Ostinato as what the streams from there should generate (that hexdump has indeed all data needed, source/dst addresses included which meant of course that it needs to match what Spirent thinks it has on the interface facing the Juniper device).

Examples of generated packets:

• OSPFv3 IPSEC Encrypted Packets
• BGP Open Packet
• BGP IPv6 Open Packet
• IPSEC ESP Packet
• BGP Update Packet
• ICMP Echo Request
• BFD echo

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