Testing in the Open

“Automation is not testing”

I recently attended a webinar where the speaker made this comment and it started me thinking about testing in general and what some of the challenges that can present.

We all know that we should be testing, but there are a lot of potential pit falls that one can fall into when starting down this journey. I’m going to jump into the deep end of the pool here and deal with one of the struggles that it took me a while to deal with.

Imagine the following:

• You have a local device with a REST API
• You write a library that accesses that REST API
• You write tests for that library so that it runs against the local devices REST API
• You push the library to GITHUB so that other people can leverage your work. ( You are a good person, right?)
• You configure TravisCI or CircleCI for integration testing.
• You realize all your tests fail because Travis/Circle doesn’t have access to your internal device.

And now your GITHUB badges all show red and no one trusts your code. Which brings us to vcrpy

What’s vcrpy?

Wow! So glad you asked! vcrpy is a REST Continue reading

Playing with Arista eAPI – Dynamic VLAN Assignment-ish

If you want dynamic VLAN assignment, there are other ways to accomplish this and I would encourage you to look into them before going down this path.

That being said – It was a fun little project and I wanted to share it with you all.

Dipping my toes in the IoT pool: Microsoft DevKit IoT Board

In my personal life, I’ve jumped in the SmartHome head first, but I’ve been really reluctant to blur the lines into my professional life. Recently, I saw something that changed all that. The Microsoft IoT DevKit board.

What is it?

This is Microsoft hardware product that allows developers to jump into the IoT pool. Specifically, the Microsoft Azure IoT hub pool. This is a very capable board with multiple sensors.

What sensors you ask?

• Humidity: 
• Air Pressure
• Temperature
• Magnetometer
• Motion
• Microphone

Basically, it’s a really good sensor that can grab the majority of the physical measurements that we want to look at in the IoT world. 

What do I do with it?

Right now, this is really just a tech toy for me. I have no specific projects that I’m trying to achieve. Rather this is a device that I’m using to try and really understand HOW the IoT ecosystem works and ensure my employability in years to come. So I don’t have any specific goals, but that’s really ok because Microsoft has been wonderful enough to supply us with the Microsoft IoT DevKit page over at Github which has a few different projects that allow me to grow Continue reading

Hey Alexa, Turn my lab on!

TL/DR Put together a custom Alexa Skill so I can turn switches and routers off in my lab as shown in the video here. Feels pretty great.

As most of my twitter followers have noticed, I’ve been doing a lot of Home Automation, mostly with Apple #homeKit. But I also picked up an Amazon Dot because… well why not?

One of the great things abut the digital voice assistance from Amazon, is that they have created an extensible framework that enables those with a little bit of coding skills to add to Mrs. A’s already already impressive impressive array of abilities.

The Amazon Alexa developer page is pretty impressive. There’s a ton of information and tutorials there, as well as an SDK and code examples in Node.js. I’m almost exclusively a python coder at this point, so I decided to look for something a little more familiar and came upon this.

Flask-Ask

Flask-Ask is a Flask extension that makes building Alexa skills for the Amazon Echo easier and much more fun.

Essentially, John Wheeler took the flask WSGI ( web) framework and made it super easy to be able to create Amazon Alexa skills using this familiar library. Continue reading

Home Automation Setup with Apple #HomeKit

As many of you know, I’ve been diving into the home automation pond for awhile now. I’ve been asked to blog out my current home setup and this is an attempt to do that. There’s MUCH too much to be put into a single post, which is why I started a new blog for this subject over at www.homekitgeek.com as well as doing some video reviews of different HomeKit accessories. Work in process, but I’ll do the short version here.

Apple HomeKit

I chose to use the Apple homeKit framework as the base for my home automation journey for a few reason. The biggest one is that I already owned a couple of Apple TV (gen4) devices which fit the home automation hub role. These devices are a homeKit hub and are the always-on/always-present devices that are used to perform orchestration/automation actions when I’m home or away. These also tie directly into Apple’s iCloud which allows me remote access to my homeKit gear without having to VPN into my home network.

Home Setup Room-By-Room

There’s a lot to talk about here, but I thought I would just do a quick description of what’s going on room-by-room Continue reading

The First IoT Culling: My Devices are Dying.

Cull: to reduce the population of (a wild animal) by selective slaughter

As an early adopter of technology, I sometimes feel like I get to live in the future. Or as William Gibson said “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. There are a lot of benefits to be gained from this, but there are also risks.  One of the biggest risks is 

How long is the product you choose going to be around?

I was an early adopter in the first wave of IoT devices, from wearables to home convenience devices, I dipped my toes in the pool early. Most of these platforms were Kickstarter projects and I’ve been generally happy with most of them, at least the ones that were actually delivered. ( That’s a story for another time…).

But in the last six months, the market seems to have decided that there are just too many of these small companies.

The Death Bells are Ringing

In the last year, I’ve noticed that there’s starting to be a trend. Many of the early platforms that I invested in seem to be disappearing. Some have been bought off and killed. Remember the Pebble watches which Continue reading

Using JSONSchema to Validate input

There are a lot of REST APIs out there. Quite a few of them use JSON as the data structure which allows us to get data in and out of these devices. There are a lot of network focused blogs that detail how to send and receive data in and out of these devices, but I wasn’t able to find anything that specifically talked about validating the input and output of the data to make sure we’re sending and receiving the expected information.

Testing is a crucial, and IMO too often overlooked, part of the Infrastructure as Code movement. Hopefully this post will help others start to think more about validating input and output of these APIs, or at the very least, spend just a little more time thinking about testing your API interactions before you decide to automate the massive explosion of your infrastructure with a poorly tested script.

What is JSONSchema

I’m assuming that you already know what JSON is, so let’s skip directly to talking about JsonSchema. This is a pythonlibrary which allows you to take your input/output  and verify it against a known schema which defined the data types you’re expecting to see.

For example, consider Continue reading

Amazon S3 Outage: Another Opinion Piece

So Amazon S3 had some “issues” last week and it’s taken me a few days to put my thoughts together around this. Hopefully I’ve made the tail-end of the still interested-enough-to-find-this-blog-valuable period.

Trying to make the best of a bad situation, the good news, in my opinion, is that this shows that infrastructure people still have a place in the automated cloudy world of the future. At least that’s something right?

What happened:

You can read the detailed explanation on Amazon’s summary here.

In a nutshell

• there was a small problem
• they tried to fix it
• things went bad for a relatively short time
• They fixed it

What happened during:

The internet lost it’s minds. Or more accurately, some parts of the internet went down. Some of them extremely ironic

Initial thoughts

The reaction to this event is amusing and it drives home the point that infrastructure engineers are as critical as ever, if not even more important considering the complete lack of architecture that seems to have gone into the majority of these “applications”.

First let’s talk about availability: Looking at the Amazon AWS S3 SLA, available here, it looks like they did fall below there 99.9% SLA for Continue reading

Shedding the Lights on Operations: REST, a NMS and a Lightbulb

It’s obvious I’ve caught the automation bug. Beyond just automating the network I’ve finally started to dip my toes in the home automation pool as well.

The latest addition to the home project was the Philipps hue light bulbs. Basically, I just wanted a new toy, but imagine my delight when I found that there’s a full REST API available. 

I’ve got a REST API and a light bulb and suddenly I was inspired!

The Project

Network Management Systems have long suffered from information overload.

Notifications have to be tuned and if you’re really good you can eventually get the stream down to a dull roar. Unfortunately, the notification process is still broken in that the notifications are generally dumped into your email which if you are anything like me…

Yes. That’s really my number as of this writing

One of the ways of dealing with the deluge is to use a different medium to deliver the message. Many NMS systems, including HPE IMC, has the capability of issuing audio alarms, but let’s be honest. That can get pretty annoying as well and it’s pretty easy to mute them.

I decided that I would use the REST interfaces of the Continue reading

Auto Network Diagram with Graphviz

One of the most useful and least updated pieces of network documentation is the network diagram. We all know this, and yet we still don’t have/make time to update this until something catastrophic happens and then we says to ourselves

Wow. I wish I had updated this sooner…

Graphviz

According to the website 

Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. It has important applications in networking, bioinformatics,  software engineering, database and web design, machine learning, and in visual interfaces for other technical domains.

note: Lots of great examples and docs there BTW.  Definitely check it out.

Getting started

So you’re going to have to first install graphviz from their website. Go ahead… I’l wait here.

Install the graphviz python binding

This should be easy assuming you’ve already got python and pip installed. I’m assuming that you do.

>>> pip install graphviz

Getting LLDP Neighbors from Arista Devices

You can use the Arista pyeapi library, also installable through pip as well.  There’s a blog which introduces you to the basics here which you can check out. Essentially I followed that blog and then substituted the Continue reading

Pseudo-Math to Measure Network Fragility Risk

Some of you may have heard me ranting on Packet Pushers on stupid network tricks and why we continue to be forced to implement kluges as a result.  I made some comment about trying to come up with some metric to help measure the deviation of the network from the “golden” desired state to the dirty, dirty thing that it’s become over time due to kluges and just general lack of network hygiene.

So I decided that I would write a bit of code to get the conversation started. All code discussed is available on my github here

The Idea

What I wanted here was to create some pseudo-mathematical way of generating a measurement that can communicate to the management structure WHY the requested change is a really, really, bad idea.

Imagine these two conversations:

Which conversation would you like to be part of?

Assumptions:

I’m making some assumptions here that I think it’s important to talk about.

1. You have a source-of-truth defined for your network state. That is you have abstracted your network state into some YAML files or something like that.
2. You have golden configurations defined in templates (ex Jinja2 ). These templates can be combined with your Continue reading

Jinja2 and… Powershell? Automation(ish) Microsoft DHCP

Most of us have home labs, right?

I’m in the middle of doing some zero touch provisioning testing, and I had the need to create a bunch of DHCP scopes and reservations, some with scope specific options, and some with client specific options. As often as I’ve had to create a Microsoft DHCP server in the lab and set up some custom scopes, I decided I was going to figure out how to automate this as much as I could with a little effort as possible.

After taking a quick look around for a python library to help me out, python being my weapon of choice, I realized that I was going to have to get into some Powershell scripting. I’ve dabbled before, but I’ve never really take the time to learn much about Powershell control structures ( loops, conditionals, pipes, etc…).  I really didn’t want to spend the time getting up to speed on a new language, so I instead decided I was going to use the python skills I had to auto generate the scripts using a little jinja2 and some google-technician skills.

Figuring out the Powershell Syntax

This was the easy part actually, Microsoft has some pretty Continue reading

Serial numbers how I love thee…

Machine Learning Resources

This page is just a place to collect different resources I’ve found as I explore Machine Learning and it’s application specially to networking analytics, infrastructure, control/management plane feedback loops and generally just geeking out on technology and math. It’s pretty amazing stuff if you haven’t gotten into it.

This is an incomplete list and I’ll continue adding to it as I get time. Feel free to share links if you’ve got any you found useful! 

 Primer

 Youtube video – low on math  youtu.be/b99UVkWzYTQ     < thanks to Jon Hudson  for this!

Presentation

Dave Meyer’s Presentation from the DevOps4Networking forum  March 2016 

Training

Coursera Machine Learning Specialization using R programming language from John Hopkins Univeristy

Coursera Machine Learning Specialization using Python programming language from University of Washington

Khan Academy has been a great source to fill in some of the gaps around Calculus, Regression, Statistics, etc… 

Devops for Networking Forum in Santa Clara

Normally, I would be writing this a few weeks ago, but sometimes the world just takes the luxury of time away from you.  In this case, I couldn’t be happier though as I’m about to part of something that I believe is going to be really really amazing.  This event is really a testimony to Brent Salisbury and John Willis’s commitment to community and their relentless pursuit of trying to evolve the whole industry, bringing along as many of the friends they’ve made along the way as possible. 

Given the speaker list, I don’t believe there’s been any event in recent ( or long term!) memory that has such an amazing list of speakers. The most amazing part is that this event was really put together in the last month!!!! 

If you’re in the bay area, you should definitely be there. If you’re not in the area, you should buy a plane ticket as you might not ever get a chance like this again. 

DevOps Forum for Networking

From the website

previously known as DevOps4Networks is an event started in 2014 by John Willis and Brent Salisbury to begin a discussion on what Devops Continue reading

Implenting Idempotency using HPE IMC

Deploying Code to Devices Through your NMS

GIT and Jinja – Like Peanut butter and Pickles!

OpenSwitch in an OVA

First, disclaimer: I’m an HPE employee. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a major contributor to the OpenSwitch project. Just thought you should know in case you think that affects my opinion here.

If you need more info on the OpenSwitch project, you can check out the other post in this series here and here

Network Engineers Don’t Like Learning New Things

Got your attention, didn’t I?  After the first couple of posts on OpenSwitch and a lot of discussions about this cool new project at some recent events, there was one piece of feedback that came back fairly consistently from the traditional engineers. OpenSwitch is hard to get running because there’s so many new things to learn.

When released in November of last year, the initial demonstration environment was actually pretty simple and streamlined to get up and running, as long as you’re a developer.  

The process involved the standard set of dev tools:

• Virtual Box
• Vagrant
• DockerToolbox
• Docker

 For anyone involved in a development environment, these tools are like an old hoody on a cold winter day. Welcome and familiar. 

But for the majority of network engineers who are far more comfortable with a console cable and Continue reading

More Jinja – Working with YAM as an Input

import yaml
from jinja2 import Environment, FileSystemLoader, Template

ENV = Environment(loader=FileSystemLoader('./'))