Network Tools, Craftsmen and Why My Mac Is a Good Hammer

Is a laptop a Hammer ?

I always per­ceived that my laptop is a spe­cial type of toolkit, in the same way that a trades­man has his tool­box of ham­mers and screw­drivers, I had a laptop with Windows and vari­ous pieces of soft­ware that are my tools. A TFTP server, note­pad for manip­u­lat­ing text files, mail cli­ent, ftp cli­ent, and so on. Back in the 90’s this was the choice.

and Windows was enough

And for the first ten years of my career, Windows was enough. It seemed to have everything I needed. Previous to net­work­ing I had been a Windows and NetWare admin­is­trator, so I was com­fort­able with the tools and never expec­ted or looked for more. Indeed, there were enough chal­lenges in IT in the early nineties because there was no Internet.

As my net­work skills con­tin­ued to grow, and I went on to learn more, I star­ted to dabble in Linux, Perl, Apache and sim­ilar. This opened my eyes to a whole new world of tools. Tools that could be cus­tom­ised to my method of work­ing, tools that I could craft to do things that I had not done before. New ways of work­ing and thinking.

My key tool then became Linux and Perl (which led to NMIS (Network Management Information System) and a couple of years of dab­bling as a net­work mon­it­or­ing tool and then into other areas of net­work mon­it­or­ing and man­age­ment focus­sing on Linux. While I never became a mas­ter of Linux or Perl (to my regret), I have some handy skills that I use often (espe­cially when design­ing). I have spent some time dab­bling in web serv­ers and build­ing web­sites for fun and learned a lot along the way.

and to OS X

And now I have my MAC. Which has the all the tools of Linux, includ­ing Perl, and a whole raft of zen­ware that make my day more pro­duct­ive, and, in some tenu­ous way, more enjoy­able. Anything that makes my day uplift­ing is well worthwhile.

I use quite spe­cific pieces of soft­ware to do cer­tain tasks — thus

• Firefox (but mostly for the addons such as del​.icio​.us, Foxy Proxy and HTTP Header
• Omni Outliner to col­late thoughts into a coher­ent whole when researching
• Keynote for visu­ally effect­ive cor­por­ate presentations
• Omni Graffle — faster dia­gram­ming than Visio (export might get bet­ter in V5 ? )
• *nix tools for test­ing (dig etc)
• Safari — as a backup browser
• and so on

More recently I have moved to using Applescript and Perl to do some unusual things, Ivan Peplnejak blog IOS Hints and Tips has tips on using EEM to do quite unima­gin­able things to your IOS router.

After con­sid­er­ing those trades­men who make their own tools, I feel some affin­ity to them. While I have not exactly cre­ated a ham­mer from raw mater­i­als, I have taken an off the shelf tool and craf­ted it into a shape that I can use faster, and more effect­ively. It took me some time to develop my cur­rent level of ‘mas­tery’ and I will con­tinue to develop exertise.

I feel good about that, believ­ing that my work has “craft and skill” is worth­while thing.

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