In part one I gave an overview of the more fundamental features of find. Here, I’ll go over how we can incorporate regular expressions.

Regular expressions are one of those skills that you’ll end up using throughout of your career, from using in a bash script, BGP route manipulation or filtering, or a simple grep.

One of the features that makes find awesome is its ability to incorporate regular expressions, to create granular search patterns.

When using Linux you’ll come to use a certain group of tools daily. In your tool bag you’ll no doubt have a worn grep, a shiny sed, a beat up awk, and a collection of other well used tools. One of my personal favourites is find.

Find allows us to pinpoint a specific file by name, or by a certain characteristic. We can link these search options together to work with very granular patterns to match against.

Though Linux is usually thought of as a server OS. It has huge amount of other implementations from embedded systems, the world of IOT, the mobile phone sector, and we’re all still waiting for the year of the Linux Desktop(sure it’ll be this year). But a function that is often over looked is the available routing protocol suite that eanbles linux to function as a router.

The routing protocol suite started off as a project called Zebra, which after becoming discontinued morphed into Quagga Routing Software. We’ll be using FRRouting, which is a project that has been forked from Qugga, and is under active development.

Generic Routing Encapsulation(GRE) tunnels are a technology that was developed by Cisco but, is now an open standard through RFC 2784. GRE tunnels can provide use with a lot of versatility when needing to move different protocols between networks. Though we have now moved into an era that is predominantly TCP/IP, when GRE was developed it was at a time of multiple network technologies, IPX, Appletalk, Token Ring, etc, flourished. GRE provided the ability to encapsulate these technologies and let them traverse an Internet Protocol network.

Whilst recently recertifying for my LFCS the networking section had been further expanded and now included static routes. I thought this was fantastic. Though I know a lot of people use linux, I doubt many get down into the plumbing, and work with the networking on their machines. This is just going to be a little walk through of setting up a static route.

Static routes can come in handy for connecting environments with multiple networks. By using static routes, we can direct our traffic, and make sure the more efficient paths are being used.

I passed my Linux Foundation Certified Systems Administrator Exam a few weeks back. This was a recertification. Since I last took the exam the syllabus has been overhauled. Where previously you would choose between CentOS and Ubuntu, they have now gone for a vendor neutral approach.

I was hoping for the release of the new LFCE, but I fear that this is never coming. I did message the team a year ago and was told it was in development, but haven’t seen any update. This will be a future decider for whether to stay with the Linux Foundation or move over to the Red Hat certification track. As there isn’t any advancement, only lateral movement through the Kubernetes certifications.