Background I have a django app that shows host links to internal employees, wanted to grab status from Nagios without having to go to a bunch of trouble screen scraping. Found this quick script from Alex Wright, and modified it to work where I can call it from a Django function, then I just loop through my models and match the json object to the model. Steps to deploy Upload file: status2json.

Background I’ve got a customer who has an MPLS network across several providers, tied together through my company’s network. These sites all tie back to my customer access router (CAR01) via point to hub links, coming in from major providers. All the customer’s sites are in their own VRF, with their own OSPF instance, which handles almost all the routing and local site LAN private routing. The customer uses a “hosted firewall” company, which I’ll keep to myself, but they have issues getting them to work on stuff, so they asked us, could we bridge thier MPLS network over to Azure, through our “hub” instead of at one of the sites.

Decided to start blogging just the tech stuff, and less personal stuff, at least for now. I’ve been blogging since the late 90s when geocities came along. I’ve used most of the popular blogging software over the years, but feel like maybe I should be blogging all my tech stuff. On my personal blog, it’s scattered with ranting, tech posts, life stuff, vacations, etc. I think maybe it needs to be seperated out.

Following up from my last post, I went ahead and moved all my personal email domains over to Fastmail. I also pre-paid for a pretty lengthy subscription, since it was so cheap for a long term, even cheaper than Zoho was if I paid for three years. That’s three less years to worry about emails. I very much debated setting up a cloud based mail server, that I would be able to keep encrypted, and totally private, but, for now, I think I’m okay with Fastmail, they’re not mining my emails for ads, and that was my primary concern.

I’ve been thinking a lot about email privacy lately. It seems the free accounts are now mining your email for ways to show you advertisements. This is not something I want, it raises all sorts of privacy concerns. Last week, I had a friend say in an email he was thinking of going to Ireland. A few hours later, I checked my gmail, only to see an email with the subject: “flash deals on trips to Ireland!