Using netlab for Classroom Training with Sander Steffann

In March 2024, I received my first PR from an airplane: Sander Steffann was flying to South Africa to deliver an Ansible training and fixed a minor annoyance in the then-new multilab feature.

Of course, I wanted to know more about his setup, but it took us over a year and a half till we managed to sit down (virtually) and chat about it, the state of IPv6, the impact of CG-NAT on fraud prevention, and why digital twins don’t make sense in large datacenter migrations.

For more details, listen to Episode 202 of Software Gone Wild.

netlab 25.11: SRv6 on IOS/XE, Streamlined Graphs and Reports

I managed to push out netlab release 25.11 yesterday. Here are the highlights:

• SRv6 on IOS/XE. It works with Catalyst 8000v, IOL, and IOL layer-2 image, and can be used to build L3VPNs (the IOS/XE image I have supports no other service on top of SRv6)
• RIPv2/RIPng on OpenBSD
• A more streamlined way to create reports and graphs
• The netlab graph command creates the SVG/PNG/JPEG/PDF graph instead of a graph description file if you’ve installed D2/Graphviz on your system.

We also had to make a few potentially-breaking changes, fixed a bunch of bugs, and added over a dozen small improvements.

You’ll find all the details in the release notes.

Worth Reading: The Majority AI View

Many engineers who tried out (or use) various AI products would agree that they’re useful when used correctly, but way overhyped. However, as Anil Dash explains in his Majority AI View article, we rarely hear that opinion:

What’s amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality.

One-Arm Hub-and-Spoke VPN on Arista EOS

In September 2024, I described how you can build One-Arm Hub-and-Spoke VPN with MPLS/VPN. In that blog post, I mentioned that the solution doesn’t work on Arista EOS because it allocates MPLS labels to whole VRFs (per-VRF label allocation).

In early September, I received an email from Daniel Blažek telling me that Arista fixed this particular annoyance in the EOS release 4.34.2F. It still uses per-VRF label allocation, but now, you can assign a different label to the default route. Let’s see how that works with our one-arm hub-and-spoke topology:

netlab: Test IPv6 IGP Deployment

Imagine you have an IPv4-only network¹ and want to try out how to deploy a routing protocol for IPv6. netlab is a pretty good tool for the job as it:

• Creates an addressing scheme for you
• Designs a routing protocol deployment (OSPF, IS-IS) based on just a few bits of information
• Deploys ready-to-run router configurations to a virtual lab.

Lab: Adjust IS-IS Timers

Like any other routing protocol, IS-IS has several timers you can tweak to improve the convergence speed of your network, or make your network unstable (eventually breaking it completely) if you reduce them too much (if you care about fast convergence, you REALLY SHOULD use BFD).

You’ll find more details (and the opportunity to tweak the timers in a safe environment) in the Adjust IS-IS Timers lab exercise.

Click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces (or set up your own lab infrastructure). After starting the lab environment, change the directory to feature/6-timers and execute netlab up.

Presentation: Testing Disaster Recovery Designs

Someone asked for my DEEP 2025 presentation (Testing Disaster Recovery Designs). You can download it here (no strings attached). I hope you’ll find it interesting.

Worth Reading: AI Won’t Replace Network Engineers

Jason Gintert published an excellent explanation why AI won’t replace (all) network engineers, and reading it, I felt like reading one of my “automation won’t replace network engineers” blog posts.

Here’s a quote to get you in the mood:

AI will make good engineers better and will expose mediocre ones. If your value proposition is memorizing CLI commands or being a human grep for log files, then yes, you might need to be worried.

The Curious Case of Default OSPF Interface Timers

We run two types of integration tests before shipping a netlab release: device integration tests that check whether we correctly implemented netlab features on all supported devices, and platform integration tests that check whether rarely-used core functionality works as expected.

I want to have some validation included in the platform integration tests to ensure the lab devices are started, and that the links and the management network work as expected. The simplest way to get that done is to start OSPF with short hello intervals (to get adjacency up in no time), for example:

Ansible Release 12: the Windows Vista Moment

My first encounter with Ansible release 12 wasn’t exactly encouraging. We were using a few Ansible Jinja2 filters (ipaddr and hwaddr) in internal netlab templates, and all of a sudden those templates started crashing due to some weird behavior of attributes starting with underscore.

We implemented don’t use Ansible release 12 as a quick workaround, but postponing painful things is never a good solution(see also: visiting a dentist), so I decided to try to make netlab work with Ansible release 12. What a mistake to make.

New Project: Open-Source VXLAN/EVPN Labs

After launching the BGP labs in 2023 and IS-IS labs in 2024, it was time to start another project that was quietly sitting on the back burner for ages: open-source (and free) VXLAN/EVPN labs.

The first lab exercise is already online and expects you to extend a single VLAN segment across an IP underlay network using VXLAN encapsulation with static ingress replication.

Worth Reading: AI for Network Managers

Pat Allen wrote an interesting guide for managers of networking teams dealing with the onslaught of AI (HT: PacketPushers newsletter).

The leitmotif: use AI to generate a rough solution, then review and improve it. That makes perfect sense and works as long as we don’t forget we can’t trust AI, assuming you save time doing it this way.

OMG: Automatic OSPFv3 Router ID on Cisco IOS

Found this incredible gem¹ hidden in the Usage Guidelines for the OSPFv3 router-id configuration command part of the Cisco IOS IPv6 reference guide.

The whole paragraph seems hallucinated², but that couldn’t be because the page was supposedly last updated in 2019, and LLMs weren’t good enough to write well-structured nonsense at that time:

OSPFv3 is backward-compatible with OSPF version 2.

No, it is not.

Adding a Syslog Server to a netlab Lab Topology

netlab does not support a Syslog server (yet), but it’s really easy to add one to your lab topology, primarily thanks to the Rsyslog team publishing a ready-to-run container. Let’s do it ;)

Adding a Syslog Server

Rsyslog is an open-source implementation of a Syslog server (with many bells and whistles, most of which we won’t use) that can (among other things) log incoming messages to a file. Even better (for our use case), the Rsyslog team regularly publishes Rsyslog containers; we’ll use the rsyslog/rsyslog-collector container because it can “receive logs via UDP, TCP, and optionally RELP, and can send them to storage backends or files.”

DEEP Is Still a Must-Attend Boutique Conference

I love well-organized small conferences, so it wasn’t hard to persuade me to have another talk at the DEEP Conference in Zadar, Croatia. This time, I talked about the role of digital twins in disaster recovery/avoidance testing. You might know my take on networking digital twins; after that, I only had enough time to focus on bandwidth and latency matter, and this is how you emulate limited bandwidth and add latency bit.

Lab: Drain Traffic From an IS-IS Node Before Starting Maintenance

Here’s a cool feature every routing protocol should have: a flag that tells everyone a node is going down, giving them time to adjust their routing tables before disrupting traffic flow.

OSPF never had such a feature; common implementations set the cost of all interfaces to a very high value to emulate it. BGP got it (the Graceful BGP Session Shutdown) almost 30 years after it was created. IS-IS had the overload bit from day one, and it’s just what an IS-IS router needs to tell everyone else they should stop using it for transit traffic. You can try it out in the Drain Traffic Before Node Maintenance lab exercise.

Click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces (or set up your own lab infrastructure). After starting the lab environment, change the directory to feature/5-drain and execute netlab up.

Public Videos: Graph Algorithms in Networks (Part 1)

The first half of the Graph Algorithms in Networks webinar by Rachel Traylor is now available without a valid ipSpace.net account; it discusses algorithms dealing with trees, paths, and finding centers of graphs. Enjoy!

OSPF Router ID and Loopback Interface Myths

Daniel Dib wrote a nice article describing the history of the loopback interface¹, triggering an inevitable mention of the role of a loopback interface in OSPF and related flood of ancient memories on my end.

Before going into the details, let’s get one fact straight: an OSPF router ID was always (at least from the days of OSPFv1 described in RFC 1133) just a 32-bit identifier, not an IPv4 address². Straight from the RFC 1133:

netlab: Embed Files in a Lab Topology

Today, I’ll focus on another feature of the new files plugin – you can use it to embed any (hopefully small) file in a lab topology (configlets are just a special case in which the plugin creates the relative file path from the configlets dictionary data).

You could use this functionality to include configuration files for Linux containers, custom reports, or even plugins in the lab topology, and share a complete solution as a single file that can be downloaded from a GitHub repository.

Lab: Hide Transit Subnets in IS-IS Networks

Sometimes you want to assign IPv4/IPv6 subnets to transit links in your network (for example, to identify interfaces in traceroute outputs), but don’t need to have those subnets in the IP routing tables throughout the whole network. Like OSPF, IS-IS has a nerd knob you can use to exclude transit subnets from the router PDUs.

Want to check how that feature works with your favorite device? Use the Hide Transit Subnets in IS-IS Networks lab exercise.

Click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces (or set up your own lab infrastructure). After starting the lab environment, change the directory to feature/4-hide-transit and execute netlab up.