How nice would it be to have a fabric health dashboard displaying a summary of numerous parameters you’re interested in (number of operational uplinks, number of BGP sessions…) for every switch in your fabric.
I’m positive you could hack something together using the customization capabilities of your favorite network management system… or you could write a simple data gathering solution like Stephen Harding did while attending the Building Network Automation Solutions online course.
A while ago I had an interesting discussion with someone running VMware NSX on top of VXLAN+EVPN fabric - a pretty common scenario considering:
His fabric was running well… apart from the weird times when someone started tons of new VMs.
Read more ...A Docker networking rant coming from my good friend Marko Milivojević triggered a severe case of Deja-Moo, resulting in a flood of unpleasant memories caused by too-successful “disruptive” IT vendors.
Imagine you’re working for a startup creating a cool new product in the IT infrastructure space (if you have an oversized ego you would call yourself “disruptive thought leader” on your LinkedIn profile) but nobody is taking you seriously. How about some guerrilla warfare: advertising your product to people who hate the IT operations (today we’d call that Shadow IT).
Read more ...Have you ever seen an Ansible playbook where 90% of the code prepares the environment, and then all the work is done in a few template and assemble modules? Here’s an alternative way of getting that done. Is it better? You tell me ;)
Anycast (advertising the same IP address from multiple servers/locations) has long been used to implement scale-out public DNS services (the whole root DNS system runs on massive anycast), but it’s not as common in enterprise networks.
The blog posts written by Tom Bowles should get you there. He started with the idea and described his implementation using Infoblox DNS.
Want to know even more? I covered numerous load balancing mechanisms including anycast in Data Centers Infrastructure for Networking Engineers webinar.
A while ago Johannes Weber tweeted about an interesting challenge:
We want to advertise our AS and PI space over a single ISP connection. How would a setup look like with 2 Cisco routers, using them for hardware redundancy? Is this possible with only 1 neighboring to the ISP?
Hmm, so you have one cable and two router ports that you want to connect to that cable. There’s something wrong with this picture ;)
Read more ...Remember Nicky Davey describing how he got large DMVPN deployment back on track with configuration templating? In his own words…:
Configuration templating is still as big win a win for us as it was a year ago. We have since expanded the automation solution, and reading the old blog post makes me realise how far we have come. I began working with this particular customer in May 2017, so 2 years now. At that time the new WAN project was on the horizon and the approach to network configuration was entirely manual.
Here’s how far he got in the meantime:
Read more ...Last week I covered network security groups, application security groups and user-defined routes in the second live session of Azure Networking webinar.
We also had a great guest speaker on the Network Automation course: Damien Garros explained how he used central source-of-truth based on NetBox and Git to set up a network automation stack from the grounds up.
Recordings are already online; you’ll need Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to access the Azure Networking webinar, and Expert ipSpace.net Subscription to access Damien’s presentation. Azure Networking webinar is also part of our new Networking in Public Clouds online course.
This is a guest blog post by Philippe Jounin, Senior Network Architect at Orange Business Services.
You could use track objects in Cisco IOS to track route reachability or metric, the status of an interface, or IP SLA compliance for a long time. Initially you could use them to implement reliable static routing (or even shut down a BGP session) or trigger EEM scripts. With a bit more work (and a few more EEM scripts) you could use object tracking to create time-dependent static routes.
Cisco IOS 15 has introduced Enhanced Object Tracking that allows first-hop router protocols like VRRP or HSRP to use tracking state to modify their behavior.
Read more ...I have exciting news I’d love to share with you: we’re launching a new online course focused on networking in public clouds starting in February 2020 (I’ve been mulling over this idea and polishing the concept for almost 18 months, and finally it all came together ;)
With Go To The Cloud becoming the answer to all questions (regardless of what the question is), you can find tons of materials describing various aspects of public clouds, so you might wonder why I decided to enter the fray. The answer is simple: with everyone being focused on developers, there’s not much that an infrastructure engineer could use to help him survive when the developers move on and he’s left to manage whatever they put in place.
Read more ...Every few weeks I stumble upon an article (or twitter storm) in which someone claims you don’t need formal education to get started as a Software Engineer (or whatever else) - all you need is a coding academy/bootcamp and you're all set.
George V. Neville-Neil wrote a hilarious rebuttal of this idea followed by some pretty good advice. Hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did ;)
A long while ago Daniel Dib wrote a nice blog post on “SDN will make the networking engineers obsolete” theme. While it sounds like beating a dead horse, the SDN craze isn’t subsiding, so another healthy dose of common sense might come handy.
Hint: if you’re not following Daniel’s blog, you should… even though he decided to make old farts’ life harder by publishing on LinkedIn.
Sick-and-tired of intent-based GUIs that are barely better than CiscoWorks on steroids? How about asking Siri-like assistant queries about network state in somewhat-limited English and getting replies back in full-blown sentences?
Warning: you might be reentering the land of unicorns driving flying DeLoreans... but then keep in mind what Arthur Clarke had to say on this topic ;).
Welcome to Net2Text, another proof-of-concept tool created by the group led by Laurent Vanbever… who joined us for a short chat to discuss it, resulting in Episode 105 of Software Gone Wild.
The autumn 2019 webinar season is in full swing ;) We’re almost done with Azure Networking webinar (the last session will take place on October 10th) and the network automation course is nicely chugging along – a few weeks ago Matthias Luft talked about supply-chain security in open-source software and today we’ll enjoy the start with a single source of truth presentation by Damien Garros.
Dinesh Dutt is coming back on October 8th with another installment of EVPN saga, this time focused on running EVPN on Linux hosts, and on October 22nd Donald Sharp will tell us all about the underlying magic box – the Free Range Routing software.
But there are even more open-source goodies waiting for you: on October 15th we’ll have Pete Lumbis describing the new features Cumulus Linux got in the last year, including AutoBGP and AutoMLAG.
Most everything I mentioned above apart is accessible with Standard ipSpace.net Subscription, and you’ll need Expert Subscription to enjoy the automation course contents.
A while ago Ruben Tripiana tried to configure BGP on Cisco IOS using IETF YANG data models… and failed. In Spring 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions online course Chris Crook decided to deploy BGP routing on multiple platforms using YANG data models instead of configuration templates. Not only did he succeed, he also documented his work and the tools he used, and published the solution so you can replicate his efforts.
You can find many more network automation solutions created by the attendees of our automation course in solutions showcase.
Two weeks ago I replied to a battle-scar reaction to 7-layer OSI model, this time I’ll address a much more nuanced view from Russ White. Please read his article first (as always, it’s well worth reading) and when you come back we’ll focus on this claim:
The OSI Model does not accurately describe networks.
Like with any tool in your toolbox, you can view the 7-layer OSI model in a number of ways. In the case of OSI model, it can be used:
Read more ...In last week’s continuation of EVPN never-ending story Lukas Krattiger described how you could use EVPN constructs (VNIs, VRFs) to implement service insertion, and how you could combine then with policy-based routing.
TL&DW: It’s bridging and routing ;)
You’ll need Standard ipSpace Subscription to access the videos.
People who can explain complex topics in simple terms, or focus on the essentials of a particular topic are exceedingly rare… and two of the best are Randall Munroe of the XKCD fame and Julia Evans, the mastermind behind WizardZines. I loved her recent curl and git exercises, and I’m guessing a lot of people in this industry would benefit from her latest HTTP zine.
Similarly to what I did a long time ago with ipSpace.net, Julia recently decided to go all-in, leaving her job and focusing on explaining things. I hope it will work out and we’ll keep enjoying her tidbits of wisdom for years to come.
After identifying some of the challenges every network solution must address (part 1, part 2, part 3) we tried to tackle an interesting question: “how do you implement this whole spaghetti mess in a somewhat-reliable and structured way?”
The Roman Empire had an answer more than 2000 years ago: divide-and-conquer (aka “eating the elephant one bite at a time”). These days we call it layering and abstractions.
In the Need for Network Layers video I listed all the challenges we have to address, and then described how you could group them in meaningful modules (called networking layers).
You need free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video, or a paid ipSpace.net subscriptions to watch the whole webinar.
I had a fantastic chat with David Bombal a while ago in which we covered tons of network automation topics including “should I use Nornir or NAPALM or Netmiko?”
The only answer one can give would be “it depends… on what you’re trying to do” as these three tools solve completely different challenges.
Paramiko is SSH implementation in Python. It’s used by most Python tools that want to use SSH to connect to other hosts (including networking devices).
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