RUCKCast #86: The unsung RUCKUS Superhero named Andrea Coppini

In this, our 86th episode, Jim and John talk with Andrea Coppini, a RUCKUS SE from Spain. Andrea's name might not be well known, but the application he created certainly is well known in the RUCKUS world. Andrea is the creator of  Crossbreeder, a software application that helps RUCKUS administrators do a lot of really neat things.

Or, as he put it, he wants to be lazy, so he did a thing to help make things work faster so he can be just that, lazy.

Check this show out, and then take a look at the Crossbreeder application at
https://github.com/andreacoppini/crossbreeder

DogTag can be found at https://dogtag.tacoppini.com  

Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E
and
https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/

Transcript

John Deegan: Good afternoon, Mr. Palmer. 

Jim Palmer: Good morning, Mr. Deegan, mr. Eastcoaster. 

John Deegan: That's right, it's two hours behind, so good day. And we'll be as neutral as possible. I missed you. You weren't even jamming along to the drums. You're like, you're deep in thought. 

Jim Palmer: I'm, well, no, I was trying to write and I can't do two things at the same time.

So like, yeah, I missed my drumming thing, but we already did that episode, so no more drumming for me. My drumming 

career is over. 

John Deegan: Well, yeah, we still got to get you the band hat. But anyways, how 

are you, sir? 

Jim Palmer: Oh, hold on. Oh, is that? No, no, no, no. We're not doing that. Yes, we are. Ah, shh. 

John Deegan: Yeah, you almost made me bleep out.

Jim Palmer: What's the time? What's the time? 

John Deegan: I didn't check the time, but we're definitely off the rails in less than a minute. 

Jim Palmer: Yeah, so if the over under, if you took under on 90 seconds of off the rails, congratulations, you win a free stick, you win a free free sticker. Send, 

I have no idea how we're gonna get it to you, but yeah, you got a sticker.

John Deegan: We'll send it to him in an email. I need a rim shot. Okay, we're just totally, that's like next level off the rails for us. Anyways, so how you doing, sir?

Jim Palmer: I'm doing good, man. How are you, ben? It's actually, it actually has been a little bit since we did this.

John Deegan: It has been, you know, you've been busy. We'll, we'll get into the where was Jim for the last couple of weeks in another episode, probably. But I know you, you've been doing a lot of traveling hopefully for the good of the company and the good of Mr.

Palmer. 

Jim Palmer: I like to think of it as the good of humanity, but it's me. So it's never going to be for the good of humanity. 

John Deegan: And then there were probably Oreos involved, but, 

Jim Palmer: funny story for a totally different podcast. 

John Deegan: But no, it's been, it's been a little while. And yeah, no, I'm good. I'm good. I'm, you know, we're, we're getting to the end of the year almost, which is, you know, we're, we're in November.

This is crazy. We're kind of in a, I don't want to say a lull, but we've, I think we've exhausted the Wi-Fi 7 stuff for a little bit. I'm sure there's going to be plenty more. 

Jim Palmer: Stop saying that word. Stop saying that word. 

John Deegan: What, little? 

Jim Palmer: No, the other one. 

John Deegan: Wi-Fi? We can't stop saying Wi-Fi. This is a Wi-Fi podcast.

Yeah, I know. I'm not gonna say it. I'm not gonna say it. 

Jim Palmer: All right. 

John Deegan: So before it takes seven minutes to get to our guest. 

Jim Palmer: Well, so I like to think I was doing, you know, work for the good of humanity, which, you know, if you've met me, you know, it's totally not true, but I actually found somebody Well, I guess that's a wrong way to say it.

I bribed this person by offering him a sticker via email to come on the podcast because this person actually has done some work for the good of humanity, believe it or not. And so I wanted to bring him on, mainly because it's about a topic that John and I don't know much about, and we thought, hey, who better than to bring the creator on to talk about his tool for the good of humanity, which I think should be the new tagline.

So. Andrea, why don't you take a second and introduce yourself to the listeners and and then 

Andrea Coppini: we'll, yeah, thank you. Wow. Wow. Creator, good of humanity, man. That sets the expectation really, really high. 

John Deegan: He's going to file... 

Andrea Coppini: I'm going to disappoint so many people. 

John Deegan: He's going to file this away for when his next review is coming up.

Just throwing that out there. Yeah, 

Andrea Coppini: so yeah, I'm, I don't think I'm no creator, no good for humanity, you know, especially in my teenage years, there wasn't much good for humanity being done there. But anyway, that's a story for another day. So yeah, so yeah, first of all, thanks. Thank you both for, for having me.

 So, you know, we're, we're gonna talk about some of the tools or one tool in particular that that I wrote and that I built. 

Jim Palmer: Tell people your name. 

Andrea Coppini: That would help, right? That's true. So I'm on, yeah. So as you can see, I'm not, I don't really do this much very often, as often as you guys. So I'm Andrea, Andrea Coppini.

I, you know, despite the, the, the name, I am actually Maltese from Malta, from a tiny little island in the Med, and and, but I, I am based out of Spain nowadays, and I, I work exclusively in hospitality. For RUCKUS. So I'm a Hospitality Systems Engineer responsible for the EMEA region. And yeah, that's pretty much it.

I've been at RUCKUS now for just over 10 years. So I've got the Golden Watch and the Maserati in my driveway. 

Jim Palmer: Whoa, Hold on. Hold on. I might have some questions for after we stop recording. 

Andrea Coppini: A few, a few of those, a few of those points were a lie. So, so so yeah, so I've always been in a hospitality and yeah.

And obviously, you know, having to, having to work in, in, in that kind of environment, even before joining RUCKUS, I was I was actually, I had a small integrator myself who, and I was. doing integration work in hospitality. So, you know, I've done everything from, you know, designing, ordering, and installing APs and sticking them to the walls.

So I kind of understand the pains of deploying Wi-Fi and wired networks in in, in that space. And that has led me to, you know, build a couple of tools as well to help out, not just in that vertical, eventually to, into all kinds of verticals. So, yeah, that's, that's actually. 

Jim Palmer: This actually explains a whole lot even before we get into why we even brought you here is, is, is having that background of hospitality so, I mean, it, it actually kind of answers stuff especially because, you know, we know John he's just an SE, so, yeah, he, SEs on this.

John Deegan: No, that's might, they might be the only two se that are listening to the show are not sure.

Jim Palmer: I think there's a third 

John Deegan: Maybe, 

Jim Palmer: Maybe 

Andrea Coppini: I would . 

Jim Palmer: Okay. So John, why did we bring Andre on? 

John Deegan: So, that's a good question. So I, I first saw his name when I started a couple years back, almost three at this point for a tool called Crossbreeder.

And I'll admit, I've never actually used it. I haven't had a need to use it, but it's always been in sort of the back of my head. And anytime I typed in I think it's something about it on LinkedIn or whatever. I type it in and it always takes me there and then I navigate away. My apologies. But when Jim said, let's have Andrea on to talk about this, I was like, this is awesome.

I can actually finally understand what this is and what it could do for somebody listening. So with that said, what is Crossbreeder? 

Andrea Coppini: So essentially at its most basic, most fundamental all it is, it, it's basically a batch tool for SSH commands. Essentially it, you just feed it A-A-C-S-V file, a list of IP addresses, tick a few boxes, type in a few a few parameters, and it'll just go out and, and do whatever you tell it to, to those lists of APs, right? 

So you feed it a list of IPs, of access points, of course, and it will go out and do the same thing to multiple access points. And the reason why why kind of that is a need is that in hospitality, just like in many other verticals, but in hospitality, we deal with hundreds, sometimes thousands of access points in one single site.

So most of the time, if you need to do something on one access point, you need to do it on all your other 799 access points you have in the building. So I wanted a way to to kind of ease that, make that easy. And especially I wanted a way for the, you know, our partners or customers to do it themselves.

So I don't have to do it. Right. So that's one selfish reason. So essentially that's, that's what it does. And also when I started working on it, it wasn't a time when we at RUCKUS Multiple controller platforms. We still do, but at the time it was kind of the transition period between Zone Director and Smart Zone.

And then Unleashed came along and then we have the solo AP firmware and we needed a way to cross grade. Right? Hence the name between one platform and the other. We need an easy way to crossplay between one and the other. So there, there were a couple of scripts out there, a couple of guides to run like Python scripts and things like that, but I'm an, I'm an iPhone guy, so I'm lazy.

I want a button to press, right? I don't want to code stuff. So, that's basically, but that's basically what it is, right? It's. It's basically a batch tool for SSH commands in an easy to, in an easy to use format. 

Jim Palmer: Well, so since I've already established that, like, you're working on the benefit of all humanity that kind of makes you a superhero, right?

And, and so... Look, like, but like any good superhero, like, you know, there's, there's, we've gotten kind of the backstory, and there's a little bit of the backstory, but... Yeah. And unfortunately that now ends all of my superhero knowledge. So I'm going to go, I'm just going to guess here and be like, Hey, so there had to have been something.

And I'm, I'm curious now. I want to know like, like not, not just the, like, you know, Batman, like, you know, had his parents and Superman, you know, is it like, well, so what is your back? I mean, yeah, it's hospitality, but there's gotta be something that like, it's like you, you went. Okay. Yeah. Here's this, I want to know that story behind, like, what is that one thing that you said, I need a tool that can do it.

I'll be honest with you. I'm really loving the whole thing of I'm lazy because, you know, look, that's me. So I can embrace this. I want to know a little bit more. 

Andrea Coppini: I think the correct way of saying it is that, you know, we abide by the work smart, not hard mantra. Right. That's kind of a, a correct, a correct form of saying that we're lazy.

Jim Palmer: Well, but I work, I work really hard to be lazy. So I don't know if it I, I still, there's got to be, I want to know what, what, what was that one thing where you sat down and you just said, you just said, okay, this is going to be really hard. So let me do a whole lot of work. I want to know what, what was that story?

I mean, 

Andrea Coppini: so there's, there's a second selfish reason. So before Crossbreeder I built another tool which was an API tool called Doct Tag for naming access points. And that was basically API, right? It's API calls to the Smart Zone and that was fun. That was interesting, but I wanted something, something more.

So I wanted to learn how to do how to interact with devices via SSH programmatically. 'cause I'm not a developer, right? I don't, I. That is the last thing I want to do in technology. It's code and develop. So I don't like develop social development, ironically, for what we're talking about today, but but I wanted to learn how to do that because again, I'm lazy.

If I want to interact with network devices, I'm. Almost 99 percent of the time I'm going to be doing it via SSH. So I wanted to learn a way of doing it programmatically. And that's, that's, you know, a partly selfish reason for for, for creating Crossbreeder, that it was a way to learn how to, how to do that, how to code SSH like batch controlling SSH.

So that's a selfish reason, but you know there was also, I was also seeing a lot of feedback from other SEs and from customers where, you know, we had, we still do, we have migration tools built into the controller platforms to migrate from I don't know, from zone director to cloud, for example, or to RUCKUS One now.

But they had a lot of caveats, right? So you had to have a specific version on the Zone Director, and then you couldn't upgrade to that zone director version because you had some older APs. You know, all of these caveats, which kind of, you know, a lot of variables came in where you know, where it was much easier to just SSH into the AP and do it directly with the access point.

So, that's and that's what and that's what Crossbreeder does. It does not, it doesn't care what controller platform you're running, it talks directly to the access point via SSH. So, it really goes grassroots, goes down to the basics, and, and communicates directly to the access points over IP with no special, no special requirements.

John Deegan: Nice. 

Andrea Coppini: That makes sense?

John Deegan: Yeah. I think I have something new to play with. I'm going to dive into this a lot, but so, so we, we know the basis. We know the, the, the story behind it. As often as the case have you found anything else you can do with Crossbreeder that you weren't necessarily starting out thinking I was going to be able to do?

Andrea Coppini: Yeah, yeah, actually, that's, that's a, that's a really good point. It's funny because, you know, the original aim, which the name kind of alludes to that, it was specifically a tool to just convert from firmware X to firmware Y, right? That was the only thing it was designed to do originally. But then it kind of evolved from that.

Partly from feedback, partly from myself using it as well. Where you know, other things have cropped up, other users have cropped up. One of them, for example, was the, the, using it essentially as a network scanner, right? Where, you know, you get into a new site, you don't have access to the controller.

So you need to look for the access points on the network, you know, you know, the subnet of the, of the access points. So you know, which IP range you're roughly working with, but you don't know which AP is which, and and, and, you know, you need a way to, to figure them out. And this tool actually came in handy in figuring out which APs, you know, maybe you have some access points, which which have, which have, you know, which have orphaned, right?

So they're on the network, but for some reason, they couldn't join the controller. and they're just sitting there on the network and how are you going to figure out which ones they are because they're stuck in a ceiling somewhere and there's a conference going on you can't just walk in with the ladder so you know just this tool just feed it the whole subnet of IPs it will go out the nice thing about it is I think is that it first tries to ping that IP address And then if it, if it gets a response on that IP, then it will try to SSH that IP.

So it's really fast when, you know, when it doesn't find, you know, it does a ping, if it doesn't get a response, and I think it's 10 milliseconds, it would just skip to the next one, right? So it's really fast in, in finding. Kind of that needle in the hay stacks so to speak. There's other aspects to it, you know, like for example, it has a tool to create the control file which is used to upgrade upgrade access points.

There's a very specific format to build a control file, and if you don't get that right, then, you know, your upgrades won't work and you know, all of these things. But with Crossbreeder, there is actually a button which says, you know, click here to create a control file. You just give it the firmware file you want to create a control file for, and it will just create a control file for you, even for multiple firmware images.

So if you're doing a lot of cross grades or a lot of AP models, you can just feed it, you know, 10 firmware images, 20 firmware images, and it will just create those 10 or 20 control files. And you know, in a matter of less than a second. So yeah, so, you know, and, and the last thing that, that another thing that came about was the you know, the fact that, you know, it's not just converting firmwares.

But also, you know, you want to run a CLI command, you know, there's a, you know, you want to turn off you, you, you want to set particular QoS parameters or, you know, you want to set, you want to run some particular command on the access points, which is not available via via, via Smart zone or via the controller platform of choice, because again, it doesn't care what controller platform you're using.

So then, at a later version, I've added a field, essentially an open text field where you can just type in any commands that you want and it will just go out and run those commands. So, there's no validation, of course, it doesn't check what you've done is is, is correct. But you know, generally you would run it on one or two access points, just make sure that the result is, is what you're expecting.

And then it will just, you just feed it all your, the rest of your access points and it will just go out and do it. 

Jim Palmer: All right. So John and I are not exactly the smartest people in the book. So I got some questions for you based on some stuff you just said because I'm, I'm now confused and I'm going to fall on his sword so, you know, John doesn't feel bad asking all the questions.

You were talking about logging in, like it goes and discovers the, the APs, you know, does that subnet scan and then it tries to log in. Does it. Does it try logging in via the, like the default credentials or, and what happens if those default, I mean, I'm, I'm curious to know exactly a little bit more about how that works or how it doesn't work.

Andrea Coppini: Yeah. So that's one point which, you know, which I faced when I, when I first when I was first playing with it, like what credentials are we going to use? So there are options within the tool itself. By default, it will try to use the default credentials that we have in RUCKUS APs, you know, super SP admin.

Jim Palmer: Oh, don't let, don't let that out. That's super secret. 

Andrea Coppini: Right. So yeah, we should hide it on all the labels and all the access points. 

Jim Palmer: Look, I got, I got a, I now have a Sharpie and a mission. 

Andrea Coppini: It's going to be a big mission though. So it will try to use the default credentials. And you can actually specify, so you can specify, right?

You can say, use these credentials as stage credentials. And then there's an option to say, if those fail, try to use the default. So it will, so, the example of before where you're scanning a whole network, you might have some access points which are connected to the Smart Zone or to a controller, and they have your, you know, your secure, ultra secure credentials, password 123 but then you might have you know, a batch of access points which are still in their factory default state, right?

Which ones are you, are you going to scan for? By setting the, the right parameters, you can actually discover both, and once it does the scan, it will show you a list of all the of all the access points, the AP model. It will show you the the AP model, the firmware version they're running, the name of the access point.

If it's, you know, if... If it's default, obviously it'll show it as RUCKUS ap. If it's, if it's not default, it'll show you whatever name you gave it. So it's a very, it's, it's quite a good documenting tool as well. You know, you have a situation where, you know, you have some of your APs connecting and some not.

Maybe if you can instantly see that all your I don't know, all your R770s are not connecting, you know, because you're not running the right firmware version, the right controller version. Right. And you can instantly see that based on the result that comes out from from, from a scan, basically.

Jim Palmer: So that's actually kind of interesting because I know that's one of the things that a lot of organizations struggle with, with is you say documentation. And as soon as you said it, the first thing that popped in my head was this is actually more like asset inventory type of stuff, you know, I mean, yeah.

I mean, because I told, I was actually telling, I was telling a story last week about an AP that, you know, in my previous job that had actually been installed in the ceiling for two years. And like, it never joined anything and it was just sitting there like just. Doing nothing for two years and no one ever actually said, and no one ever said, Hey, we should have coverage here.

We don't, because it's not doing anything. And no one ever actually went to figure it out. And so it's like, here's this asset that's been sitting in a ceiling doing nothing for two years. And nobody knew it was there. 

Andrea Coppini: We, we had the reverse in one instance, in fact, where there was one access point, which was a leftover from a previous install.

Obviously, it wasn't a hotel, it wasn't a hallway above the ceiling, you know, hidden behind all the ducting and everything. But it was essentially a honeypot, right? So it's it was running the same SSIDs as the new install, but it wasn't connected to anything. Don't ask me how it was getting power, but somehow it was powered up, it was connected to some switch in some closet somewhere, and obviously nobody in the property knew where that AP was connected to, but and we couldn't get to it.

Right. So the ceiling was closed, so we couldn't even get to it to turn it off, to pull it out, to pull it out. So we use Crossbreeder to figure out you know, the the the, the IP at least of the, of the access points. So then we could essentially brute force it and figure out where it, you know, figure it out and at least turn off the radios, you know, so, yeah, so there's, you know, all of these kinds of corner cases where, you know, I've, I've kept deliberately kept Crossbreeder as simple as possible, right.

Because the more. Kind of advanced functionality you build into a tool from my viewpoint is the more advanced functionality the more you're restricting the use of that tool, right? So I've left it open as basic as possible just so that you can you can use it for it It's you know, it's one of your tools in your toolbox It doesn't do everything but you can use it as you know as you see fit essentially 

John Deegan: You say it's simple.

It looks pretty powerful to me, 

Jim Palmer: right? I bet you, I bet you John and I can break it. 

Andrea Coppini: It won't take much. I'm no developer. I'm no coder. So yeah, 

John Deegan: I have a hammer. I can break anything with a hammer. 

Andrea Coppini: Yeah, that won't take much to crash this one. That's for sure. But in fact, yeah, that does have a couple of things, which which I want to do is improve the stability and improve the speed of the, of the tool.

So you know, I haven't got there just because I don't have the, the time, but mostly the skill to, to figure out how to do it, how to do it correctly. 

Jim Palmer: So, so John, John brings up a good question. He says he can break it with a hammer. What does this, what does Crossbreeder run on? Because if I'm, you know, I'm running it on my little single board computer, then yeah, I could probably break it with a hammer.

But if it's running on my daily driver, yeah. I mean, what do you run it on? Is it, is it a server? I mean,

Andrea Coppini: It's a Windows app. It's a Windows application, Windows or macOS. So it runs on, just, it's a tool. There's no install. There's no, you know, you don't need to install JVMs, for example, or you don't need to install any of that.

You just download the zip file, unzip it, double click on the exe file, and it will just run. So that's, you know, that's one of the things which, which I really focused on. And, you know, our, our, our machines usually are loaded with all kinds of junk. So I didn't want to contribute even more to that junk. So I wanted...

So keep it simple, just a simple zip file, download, extract, run it. And that's it. And it runs on windows and macOS. 

Jim Palmer: Nice. We, we, so, so John, you can't break it with a hammer. 

John Deegan: I Don't want to break my Mac though. So we'll, we'll try not to break it. We'll just try to use it. How about that?

Jim Palmer: So what other feedback have you gotten about Crossbreeder? I mean, because. Again, I, anytime I'm on anything about RUCKUS, I always, you know, it's like somebody, somebody has always dropping like, Hey, use this Crossbreeder. So I know that there's, I mean, it's, fairly well known. I mean, you know, what type of feedback have you gotten and, and as something that was done, you know, by a RUCKUS employee, but not as a...

Andrea Coppini: Like I, like I say, even in the about, you know, this, this comes with no support. It, it's as much support as you can, you know, it's, it... I forgot how I wrote it, but it's as much support as you can get out of something which was written in between, like over a couple of flights, right? Cause that was literally where most of the coding was done, literally while I was traveling from one place to another.

But overall the feedback has been very positive. I was surprised in fact, that you know, I've seen it. I've seen it being mentioned even in some RUCKUS support documentation. Although it's definitely not a RUCKUS product, it's not supported by RUCKUS, even our own support team you know, has got into situations where, where that has helped them.

And that's, you know, that's, I'm, I'm, I'm proud of that, you know, it's nice to see that being recognized even by the support organization. Now it's being called out in webinars, you know, RTF, RUCKUS Technical Family webinars as well, and I've seen it being mentioned on Reddit. And you know, you know how it is once something gets mentioned on Reddit, that means it's achieved cult status.

So that was, that was a very proud moment, you know, because, you know, nobody praises anything on Reddit. So so that's that, that was very positive, but yeah, the feedback has been great. I mean, for being a tool, which I had no intention of you know, you know, I never, I never intended this to become anything.

It's just a small tool, which I needed for myself. And I kind of put it out there for my colleagues to use. And now it's, it's out there and people are really liking it. So. 

John Deegan: So I just want to rewind back to like a minute ago. We're, we're talking to like a cult icon, Jim. He said it, it's true. 

Jim Palmer: He's a superhero 

John Deegan: and a cult icon.

Jim Palmer: Working, working for the benefit of humanity and a cult icon. I mean, 

John Deegan: he's like, he's like Batman. 

Andrea Coppini: Nobody mentions me, they mention the tool, so I'm just a nobody. 

Jim Palmer: But after, after this, that will literally be... Tens of people who will now be able to tie Crossbreeder to Andrea. So, you're welcome. 

Andrea Coppini: Batman's butler, at most.

What was his name? 

John Deegan: Alfred. But Alfred was the brains behind the operation. And really as Batman said, his superpower was being rich. So, anyways. Now you mentioned it and Jim mentioned it. We've heard about it being mentioned all over the place. It's, it's, it's... It's pretty successful for being, you know, as you said, an unofficial part of the family which is an awesome thing to have done, so thank you for that.

Do you have any other useful tools that people might not know about? 

Andrea Coppini: Well, the other tool which kind of goes in parallel with it is DogTag. I mentioned it briefly before, and it's a completely different use case, right? And DogTag is a, it's a tool for naming access points. Well, it started out again, you know, it kind of evolves, gets a life on its own, but it started out as a tool for naming access points.

And the reason why I wrote it was again, I was tired of supporting customer sites, logging into a controller and seeing 800 access points called RUCKUS AP, which is the default name. And you know, when I was trying to, you know, whenever I asked kind of which AP are we talking about? Or what is this, which one is this access point?

They used to pull up Excel sheets, you know, again, you know, massive Excel sheets with the name, the location the, the port number and the MAC address and the name of the access point. So I was like, why, why aren't you importing these into the Smart Zone, which makes more sense, right? Having all the information in the controller, which you're, which you're managing.

And they were like, yeah, we will do it once we deploy it. But if you do it after the deployment and once it's done as part of your UAT, that is. It's already too late, right? Because your platform, in theory, should already be running stable. By then, you don't want to you know, you want, you want to have the name and the, you know, kind of all the details of your access points in front of you while you're deploying because that's where you're dealing most, with most of the issues during the deployment.

So again, so that's, that's basically the, the kind of the primary scope of the of the tool is you feed it a CSV file with MAC address of an access point, the name, the description, the GPS coordinates if you want. And and yeah, and this tool will take that CSV file, connects to a smart zone, and go out and name all the access points within the smart zone.

Because, you know, everyone likes naming access points and in Excel it's much easier, it's much faster but then you want, you know, you want that data to be in SmartZone itself. SmartZone doesn't have, still doesn't have, an easy batch naming tool. You have to go in and name the access points one by one.

Again, I'm lazy, I'm not going to go in and click on every single access point, especially if I have a hotel with, you know, 700, 800, or 1500 access points. So, That, that was how I built that tool. 

Jim Palmer: That's, that's interesting because I'm sure John is like taking notes of this one because he's, he's, he's, he's running some deployments.

Oh, he, he actually did take a note. I am, I'm beyond impressed. I thought I was the only one that wrote on this podcast. Or is that, are you making fun of me? I can't, 

Andrea Coppini: seems empty. 

Jim Palmer: Sorry. . 

Andrea Coppini: He got it. . 

John Deegan: I have notes. Stayed blurred out. Yeah.

Jim Palmer: I, you know, it's, I'll pull the curtain back a little bit. It's, this has been just a, such an interesting and fascinating conversation and John and I are, were talk, we were messaging earlier and we're like, how have we not had this conversation with you earlier? Because, I mean, I'm sitting here and it's like between.

You know, Crossbreeder and DogTag. I'm just like, I'm like, these are, these are two tools that I should have been recommending to people years ago, but I just didn't, I didn't, I didn't know about it. And I'm like, I mean, I'm, I'm just, I'm blown away by the versatility and. And I, and again, and the fact that you wrote it because you were sort of lazy, um, mad, mad respect, my friend.

I mean,

John Deegan: It can't be that lazy. He wrote it, you know, I mean, it's just

Jim Palmer: Wasn't there. Wasn't there some some like big company that was like, we give all our toughest projects to the laziest people we have, because they're the ones that come up with like the really unique ways of solving it because they're like, well, this is just easier if I completely solve it a different way.

And so again, it's. So so I mean, you say that it's not like a quote unquote official or a supported one, but with as much as I've seen it mentioned inside the company, as well as outside the company, I think, I think you're pretty safe and say, and that, you know, this is, this is a, you know, an official tool that I think more of us should be using.

And quite frankly, we should be talking more about. So 

John Deegan: you say that and I realized something, Mr. Palmer, what's that we recorded an episode two weeks ago, and this would have been perfect to be on it. But it's not an official feature, so it kind of is, we've got an excuse to leaving it off. Unsung features, unsung things, unsung, I can't talk, things about RUCKUS.

We didn't talk about Crossbreeder. 

Jim Palmer: We did not. 

John Deegan: Well, now we've got an episode two for that one. Well, heck, it was, it really, you know, it was, it shines a light. This, it's, it's so important, it's so impactful, and it's been talked about so many different places that one episode that where you got a mention wasn't enough, you got a whole episode dedicated to your tools.

Jim Palmer: Oh, that's a nice way of playing that one. 

John Deegan: You like that? 

Jim Palmer: I'm down with that. 

John Deegan: Okay. 

Jim Palmer: So I, I can't believe we're out of time and I, and the fact that you are in Spain means that even though it's still, I still, I can still officially say it's morning here, it's actually kind of late for you. Look, I got 10 more minutes while it's still morning.

John Deegan: Yeah, no, I was just keeping you honest.

Jim Palmer: How, how can people find Crossbreeder and DogTag? How can they, you know, give the feedback, you know, how can, plug yourself here for us. 

Andrea Coppini: Right. So the easiest is to just do a search for DogTag or Crossbreeder on Google. It will show up because it's on GitHub. I have a link on it on my LinkedIn profile. There is a direct link.

It's a DogTag. Dogtag. tacoppini, so T A, and then my last name, t a coppini. com. So dogtag.tacoppini.com. That will take you to to a page where I have all my tools and some documents that I wrote and you can find it there. But the easiest way is, is Google. You know, that will it, it will show up one way or another.

And and yeah, and that, that's, that's it. So, you know, if if there's anyone who has any, any feedback, you know, that's, I'm always open to feedback. It doesn't mean that I will implement them because, you know, it's, it needs a lot of time and And to kind of to, to always ramp up and go back to it from my, from what is essentially my day job, but but I'm always curious to hear how it's being used and how kind of how to, how to evolve the tool even further, you know, maybe not for the better of humanity, but for the betterment of 

Jim Palmer: So for the, for the betterment of our massive amount of listeners, I will actually do the Googling for you.

And because I think it would be really cool if our, our podcast show notes actually had a link to GitHub, because I think that would be a first for us. So I will do that work for you guys. And and get that and get that link in there so you can, you can find dog the DogTag and the crossbreeder application.

And yeah, I will be there. This has been a, this has been a fascinating conversation and one I wish we would've had a long time ago. So thank you for, for taking time out of your evening to join us today. 

Andrea Coppini: Thank you guys for having me. It was fun. 

John Deegan: Yeah, no, definitely, definitely. We appreciate it. And I think you, I think it was, it was the hardest one to schedule just because it's the biggest time zone difference we've had to deal with so far.

So you know, we, we recognize that it's like Jim said, it's I think about seven, eight o'clock for you. 

Andrea Coppini: It's, it's just before dinner time. That's what, you know, Spain, Spain moves late in general. 

John Deegan: But still, we know, we know it's it's nearly your Friday. So it's, it's, you know, you want to be relaxing with the, you know, not work.

So we appreciate it. And it was I'm really glad to, to finally have gotten under the hood with, with Crossbreeder and DogTag, which is something I hadn't known about. You know. As I joked with Mr. Palmer in the background I wasn't expecting to learn something today. It wasn't on my agenda, but I did.

So, thank you. 

Andrea Coppini: Thank you again. 

John Deegan: And on that note, I don't think we've got anything else, right Jim? 

Jim Palmer: No, we're going to let Andre go to dinner and we'll catch everybody on the next episode. 

John Deegan: Bye. 

Andrea Coppini: Thank you. Bye. 

John Deegan: If you want to contact the show directly, you can email us using the address ruckcast at comscope. com to learn more about RUCKUS products and services that we may have talked about on this or any other podcast.

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