The NOC was drowning in noise. Alarms chirped, phones buzzed, and across six monitors, Simon watched a waterfall of green-on-black console text scroll past. He was troubleshooting a BGP route flap that had taken down a remote office in Jakarta. The problem was simple: find the neighbor flapping. The reality was hell: 10,000 lines of Cisco debug output.
He saved the session log, named it Jakarta_BGP_Fix.log , and closed his laptop. Another night, another flap—killed by a few clever regex rules in a terminal emulator that knew exactly what a network engineer needed to see.
Simon used Xshell. Most of his colleagues stuck with PuTTY or SecureCRT, but Simon had spent a weekend three years ago building the perfect . xshell highlight sets cisco
Then, two seconds later—red: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface Tunnel14, changed state to down
Simon smiled. That wasn't a routing policy error. That was a tunnel interface dropping. He jumped on the Jakarta out-of-band, issued no shut on Tunnel14, and watched his Xshell screen erupt in —his custom highlight for %LINK-3-UPDOWN and %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: up . The NOC was drowning in noise
The BGP yellow highlight flashed one last time: %BGP-5-ADJCHANGE: neighbor 10.88.22.5 Up
He called it "Cisco_Filter."
And somewhere in a config file on his desktop, a highlight set for Cisco kept watching, patient and silent, waiting for the next magenta word.