Hacks

Tonight I really wish I knew Czech. I just had a whole conversation via Google Translate and it was less than satisfying. Here's the backstory:

[music | The Pixies - Break My Body]

If you'll remember back a few months, I lost a toenail after catching a drunken pit guy at Rev. Horton Heat. In today's installment, it's a fingernail.

Today I was putting some switches in a rack, and was putting in cage nuts the un-safe way. With a screwdriver instead of a cage nut tool. Here's what the aftermath of that can look like unless you're more careful than I am.

I'm putting pictures behind here for people who are queasy:

[music | Bauhaus - Dark Entries (Live)]

This is the first of a few tools I have to release in the coming couple of weeks, mainly involving Cisco's CSS product. The purpose of me writing them is that Cisco's web interface to the CSS is both a terrible user experience and has shown itself to be vulnerable to trivial attacks in the past (in a security sense). I don't want to run the web gui on my CSS's, and most of our admins were terrified of the command line. So I wrote a bunch of tools to help do their jobs, without the possibility of screwing up the load balancers.