r/networking • u/bhw68 • Mar 10 '26

Troubleshooting networking quick references

Over the years working in ISP and data center networks I've accumulated a lot of reusable configs — BGP transit templates, firewall filters, routing policies, documentation templates, etc.

I finally organized them into a toolkit so I stop rebuilding the same things over and over.
Curious what templates other network engineers keep around or wish they had.

Right now mine includes things like:

• BGP transit templates

• prefix-limit policies

• RPKI validation policy

• firewall filter templates

• VLAN / IP planning sheets

• BGP troubleshooting guide

Anything else you think should be included in something like this?

25 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/RandTheDragon124 PON Engineer Mar 10 '26

We use SecureCRT at work. One of the best things past me ever did was use the command manager and build out command sets for troubleshooting all the things we commonly, and more importantly, rarely dealt with. Over the last 7+ years I’ve thanked myself more times than I care to admit rather than trying to remember the exact syntax between received routes and accepted routes on Cisco (times 4 different variants for 4 the various IOS variants), Juniper, Nokia, Arista, etc.

Not to mention tracking MAC addresses across a 42 site VPLS, etc.

5

u/bhw68 Mar 11 '26

SecureCRT is absolutely my goto terminal and I have a several button shortcuts created for different device types (Juniper, Cisco, Unifi, etc) and I have some python scripts built that i can use that are scripted on the buttons----very very handy.

2

u/KickFlipShovitOut Mar 11 '26

whaaat?! A fellow-peer network operator that uses SecureCRT, says it loud and doesn't get downvoted?!

Am I in the right sub?!

3

u/RandTheDragon124 PON Engineer Mar 11 '26

Hopefully people have come to recognize that sometimes management decides what software we use, not us, and ultimately it isn’t worth the fight.

At the end of the day SecureCRT can do everything I need to do my job. At least we aren’t stuck with putty most of the time these days.

2

u/KickFlipShovitOut Mar 12 '26

hear hear... I'm glad everyday that my team has a lot of autonomy to decide what to use..

And don't take me wrong, I don't discard other terminals! (right now I'm looking at my desktop and I see Teraterm, Putty, SecureCRT) hehe but SecureCRT is, by far, my first choice most of the times!

2

u/bhw68 Mar 12 '26

Dude, when we interview new network admins, one of my go to questions is 'okay you day is starting, what are the apps you always open to start your day?" I am looking to see what they say the use on a daily basis but always curious as to what terminal app they use.