Networks That Connect Us with the Past

No matter if you think so or not, some days are just different. Like today, when I was¹ troubleshooting the seemingly unrelated issue of setting up a VPN tunnel on my laptop the VPN client unnecessarily dumped the names of all networks that are saved in network manager in it’s log which I was following.

For a moment, I was hit with a fair dose of nostalgia, reading the names of the networks from days gone by among the ones that I use on a daily basis took me on a journey across time and distance. That place I stayed at when I travelled overseas for the first time, and the friends I met there; that family vacation we went on sometime ago, the memories; that mobile hotspost we set up on the road; that place we travelled to, and the memories of … how darn slow that connection was! all of it came crashing through my mind as I effortlessly collected thoughts to write about it here, which you have just finished reading—by the way, thank you!

If you too feel like taking a walk along the memory lane recalled by your “network connection history”, below commands might come in handy.

# Ubuntu 
sudo ls /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/* | awk -F / '{print $5}' | sed 's/.nmconnection//g' # sure, you could have used that other command!

# Windows
netsh wlan show profiles &rem did not test!

For those with a Mac - tough luck. I’ve not got it, why should you :-)² ask AI?

Apologies if you’ve come here looking for a post about some breakthrough in network engineering, or a primer on the history of network design evolution through the years as the title may have conveyed. While I did not select it based on the “clickbaitiness”, I understand that it just might evoke such themes in a reader’s mind (it did in mine). If anything, this post was initially titled “Network-induced Nostalgia”, before settling on the current one.