Michael W Lucas Sep 19, 2025

Dear sysadmin: quit fighting with the network team. You deserve better. The only way you'll get better is to take it.

https://mwl.io/ks #kickstarter #n4sa2e

Networking for System Administrators (2nd Edition)

The critically-acclaimed sysadmin reference, updated for modern Windows and Unix

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Show threadTim Chase

@mwl

Does one really quit fighting with the network team? Or does one arm yourself with #n4sa2e so you can triumph when you go toe-to-toe with them because you know it's really their fault? 😈

"See, I've got the pcap files right here that show your network drops reply packets on the floor…"

Sep 19, 2025 at 7:20pmWeb
Show threadScruffy looking packet herderSep 20, 2025
@gumnos Yup! That’l show us. Relevant captures understood correctly. We hate that. You should do it a lot to really show us up. @mwl
Show threadTim ChaseSep 20, 2025

@sng

Lately my biggest netadmin issues have been the outsourced IT at $DAYJOB bungling certificate rollovers…forgetting names in the SAN, letting expiry-dates lapse, updating one half of a failover config, …

But there have also been a fair number of firewall/NAT rules that were tightened down without actually observing active traffic. Yes, FTP & FTPS (not SFTP) require a bit more care and feeding than your average NAT rules. 😑

(and yes, my cases had pcaps, traceroute/ping results, TLS cert dumps, and all those requisite things, leaving me feeling very vindicated 😎 )

@mwl

Show threadScruffy looking packet herderSep 20, 2025
@mwl @gumnos Oh yeah. I had to train a younger engineer a while back on old school FTP. How that works is rapidly becoming lost knowledge.