Introduction Netcat is a versatile networking utility that can be used for a wide range of tasks. It has often been referred to as the “network swiss-army knife”. Netcat was first released in the mid-90s, and I personally find it ironic to be blogging about it in 2023! But I feel like it is a somewhat cryptic tool, and new engineers or college graduates may not be familiar. This article is meant for those people who are not familiar with it, or have only briefly been exposed.

If you are using VM Scale Sets in Azure, you know how important it can be to quickly obtain an instance IP address. This can of course be done using the Azure Portal. However, I am often working in a shell or VSCode, and I do not want to leave the comfort of my shell to login to the portal. There are a few options we have for retrieving information about a VMSS and its instances without using the Azure Portal.

I ran into this issue this morning when attempting to setup a VPN on a Hyper-V virtual machine. After an hour of searching the Google machine and troubleshooting, I came upon this solution. Upon installation, AnyConnect pulls down a profile from the ASA containing several settings. This profile is in xml format and is located (on a Windows machine) at %programdata%CiscoCisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility ClientProfileAnyConnectProfile.xsd. To resolve this issue and connect to your VPN, open this file with notepad (or any text editor, run as admin), search for the “WindowsVPNEstablishment” tag, and modify the value.

Going over the basics of network fundamentals and all the models and ideas behind them. The most pushed idea is the OSI networking model which consists of 7 layers, all of which deal with a certain aspect of the networking model. A P S T N D P From the top down this represents the following Layer 7: Application – This layer is the channel between software and external requests. For example, a web server would work with this layer to process HTTP requests.

Switches are devices that support a large number of ports to connect devices to the network. Design: More towards a CCNP or CCDA topic, but designing a network when it comes to the switching side can be done in three building blocks. The access layer, the distribution layer, and the core layer. The access layer generally has a high port density, can support VLANs, QoS, and access lists. The distribution layer will aggregate multiple access layer switches.