Gcp

I finally wrote up my notes on getting a modern Cisco Catalyst 9800-CL running on Google Cloud Platform.

This was my first time using Codex to bring up a GCP setup from scratch. I supplied the goals and directed the work; Codex did essentially all of the technical investigation, image modifications, and scripting to get the controller working. Codex also drafted this post.

The short version is that this was much more of a fight than I expected.

Cisco’s public GCP-facing material still nudges people toward Google Cloud Marketplace, but the Marketplace offerings I found were outrageously old: 16.12.1 and 16.12.2s from the 2019-2020 era, plus 17.2.1 and 17.3.5a from the 2020-2021 era.

That is a pretty bad situation if what you actually want is a modern WLC on GCP. The version I actually worked from was 17.15.04d, which Cisco’s software portal lists with a release date of 19-Dec-2025. Cisco’s public guidance still points at a path that appears stuck on software families from years ago, and it was not a good starting point for getting a current controller running.

Getting a newer image directly from Cisco’s site did not end the fight. That image’s GCP support was broken too, and Codex ended up ripping into it to figure out what the hell was going wrong. Under my direction, it investigated the boot path and worked through the image modifications needed to get the controller running. This was much more than asking it to write a few deployment commands.

I have to give Codex credit for sticking with that stuff. Ripping apart a broken appliance image is nasty, patient trial-and-error work, especially when GCP is involved. Finding out whether a change worked can take minutes, and getting somewhere can take many attempts. Codex also configured serial logging and read through the serial logs to figure out what was happening during boot and what to try next. It kept working through that slow feedback loop. That persistence impressed me as much as the technical work itself.

I put the actual handoff-style guide here:

• Cisco Catalyst 9800-CL on GCP guide

That guide covers:

• where to get the qcow2
• why Marketplace is not a great baseline right now
• what actually worked to get the controller reachable
• how I validated it was really up
• how to adopt an AP into the supported public-cloud path

One of the main conclusions is that Cisco’s built-in GCP bootstrap path seems to create real first-boot state that the appliance expects, which helps explain why simply editing /varied/iosxe_config.txt offline was not enough on a pristine raw image.

Anyway: what a fight. But at least the notes are in one place now.

I built https://cellshield.info to scratch an itch. Why can’t I embed a spreadsheet cell?

You can click on that badge and see the sheet that is the data backing the badge.

It is useful for embedding a cell from an informal database that is a Google Spreadsheet atop of some README, wiki, forum post, or web page. Spreadsheets are still how many projects are managed and this can be used to embed a small preview of important or attention grabbing data.

It is a simple Go server that uses Google’s API to output JSON that https://shields.io can read. Mix it in with some simple VueJS generator front-end to take public spreadsheet URLS and tada.

I picked to base my implementation on shields.io’s as they make really pretty badges and have a lot of nice documentation and options.

I run it on Cloud Run to keep the costs low and availability high. It also utilizes Google’s implementation of authorization to get access to the Sheets API.

The badge generator web UI can also make BBCode for embedding (along with modern Markdown and so on).

I’ve already used it for this and that. The former outputs a running bounty total and the latter is community annotation progress.

A major Game Boy development contest is using it labels to display the prize pool amount: https://itch.io/jam/gbcompo21

Why I built this?

I built it for the Comma10K annotation project. I contributed the original badge which attempted to use a script that was used in the repo to analyze the completion progress. Unfortunately, this kept on diverging from the actual progress because the human elements kept changing the structure and organization and I had the badge removed. The only truth is what was on the spreadsheet.

Popularity

Compared to my other projects, I don’t think the popularity will be too good for this project though. I think it might have a chance to spread via word of mouth but it’s not everyday that a large public collaborative project is born with a Google Spreadsheet managing it. The name isn’t that great either as it probably conflicts with anti-wireless hysteria. Also, it’s not like there’s an agreed upon community of Google Spreadsheet users to share this knowledge with.

I also shamelessly plugged it here but I think the question asker might be deceased:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57962813/how-to-embed-a-single-google-sheets-cells-text-content-into-a-web-page/68505801#68505801

At least it was viewed 2,000 times over the last two years.

Maintenance

It’s on Cloud Run. The cost to keep it running is low as it sometimes isn’t even running and the Sheets V4 API it uses was recently declared “enterprise-stable”. Because of this, it will be super easy to maintain and cheap to run. I don’t expect any more than $2 a month.

I built this in March, but I figure I’ll write about this project better late than never. I supercharged it in June out of curiosity to see how it would perform. It’s just a ramble. I am not a good writer but I just wanted to write stuff down.

TLDR: I mirrored all of GitHub’s wiki with my own service to get the content on Google and other search engines.

If you’ve used a search engine to search up something that could appear on GitHub, you are using my service.

https://github-wiki-see.page/

Did you know that GitHub wikis aren’t search engine optimized? In fact, GitHub excluded their own wiki pages from the search results with their robots.txt. “robots.txt” is the mechanism that sites can use to indicate to search engines whether or not to index certain sections of the site. If you search on Google or Bing, you won’t find any results unless your search query terms are directly inside the URL.

The situation with search engines is currently this. For example, if you wanted to search for information relating to Nissan Leaf support of the openpilot self-driving car project in their wiki, you could search for “nissan leaf openpilot wiki”. Unfortunately, the search results would be empty and would contain no results. If you searched for “nissan openpilot wiki”, “https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/wiki/Nissan" would show up correctly because it has all the terms in it. The content of the GitHub wiki page is not used for returning good results.

https://github-wiki-see.page/

A project to get GitHub Wikis indexed by Google Search.

Explanation is right on the front page.

If a search engine can’t see it, it may as well be invisible.

Long-term project involving Rust, BigQuery, Cloudflare Workers, and lots of random hosting.

Probably one more the more visited sites on the internet and a continous effort to keep costs low.

Has caused GitHub to revisit their policy on a limited subset of Wikis meeting some criteria.

Will continue until all Wikis are indexed even if they are publically editable or don’t meet some star count criteria.

Personally, I just got really dismayed all this documentation I was doing on a Wiki wasn’t visible to Google. Then I realized it was a good idea to make it visible. Then I realized others don’t realize it was invisible at all. This was a problem.