When launching EC2 instances on AWS, you might need to install and run the CloudFormation helper scripts (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/TemplateReference/releasehistory-aws-cfn-bootstrap.html). However, since February 2026, as of the latest CloudFormation helper scripts version 2.0-38 (released on 2025-12-04), installing them works fine, but running for example cfn-init causes an error: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘pkg_resources’ The reason is this […]
What does this mean in the HPE Networking AOS-CX REST API response when getting the MAC address tables from a switch: GET /rest/v10.08/system/vlans/*/macs/*,*… ‘dynamic,11:22:33:44:55:66’: { ‘aged_on_subsystems’: {}, ‘attributes’: {‘local_move_disable’: False}, ‘denied’: False, ‘derived_entry_src’: ‘none’, ‘desired_port’: { ‘1/1/49’: ‘/rest/v10.08/system/interfaces/1%2F1%2F49’ }, ‘from’: ‘dynamic’, ‘inactivity_timeout’: 300, ‘mac_addr’: ’11:22:33:44:55:66′, ‘network_infra_mac’: False, ‘never_ageout’: False, ‘port’: None, ‘selected’: True },… Why […]
I, for one, was quite excited when IKEA announced new Matter-based affordable smart home devices in 2025. I finally got to buy some of them and I was going to add them in my existing Home Assistant system. Specifically, for this test, I bought: They are talking with each other using Matter over Thread, the […]
Over the years I’ve done quite much software, integration and business process development using NetBox. Still, when developing code and configurations in various contexts, I’m sometimes unsure about the object or model syntax I need to follow. Thus, this post. Update on 2026-01-27: There is NetBox PR #21209 currently in the progress to unify the […]
In F5 BIG-IP devices there is iControl REST API for interfacing with the devices programmatically. In this post I’ll briefly describe the basics of using the API in Python. I’ll be using BIG-IP version 17.1 here with a separately created non-administrator user account. For starters I’ll use a Python virtual environment to contain the separately-installed […]
I’ve recently used various kinds of message queues when building various apps that have needs to communicate with other parts of the app. For remote use, when the messaging parties are not on the same host, I’ve mostly used Amazon SQS, the Simple Queue Service. When using the SQS ReceiveMessage API call you can select […]
Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025. If the PC meets the minimum requirements for Windows 11, Windows Update should offer upgrading to Windows 11 automatically. And when the upgrade is completed, then you should have a supported OS running again. Right? Not exactly always so. On one of my Windows 10 […]
I have made occasional contributions to the Wireshark project for over five years now. I started with small documentation updates, and later I have added two new protocol dissectors (Zabbix and Z21) as well as improved some other dissectors. It can be several months between contributions though, so this post is my own memo about […]
When installing a Debian Linux virtual machine on a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) host, the Debian installer automatically installs the VirtIO paravirtualization drivers and the QEMU guest agent so that no extra configurations are needed for full cooperation with the virtualization host. In Windows Server 2025 those drivers and utilities are not included. It means […]
In Python, sometimes you just need to catch all exceptions and show which one was it: