I can’t believe I stuck with something for 2 years.  I usually get a month in before I get bored and give up.

Anyway, 2 years ago this month, I wrote a terribly-written article on The Principle of Least Privilege.  Since then, though, my writing has improved (at least, I think it has), the topics have broadened, and I’ve picked up some faithful readers (thanks, Mom!).

SSH is more than just a shell.  You can copy files from and to a server or piece of network gear with it.  You can use it to tunnel traffic.  Possibly my favorite, though, is to use SSH to run a command on a remote box without interacting with a shell.

One of my biggest pet peeves with IOS (or pretty much any Cisco OS) is the lack of complex filtering.  Let’s say I want to look at all the downed ports and interfaces on modules 3 and 6 of my 6509.  I can’t easily do that with command from the IOS, but, on my Linux box, I can use multiple grep commands to get exactly what I want really easily.  Let’s work through the example, shall we?