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Category Archives for "The Gratuitous Arp"

Network Automation is not an Effortless Spacewalk

Recent events have shown us that successfully landing on the moon is anything but routine and no easy feat. Somehow it seems we are surprised. Thats puzzling. I recently read The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America’s Race in Space by Eugene Cernan and Donald A. Davis * NASA Images Photo READ MORE

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Kill the CLI

As the conversation about Network Automation flows around us, this topic seems to be getting some traction (and quite a reaction!). Have you disabled the CLI? Should we disable the CLI? How long before the CLI is disabled? I don’t believe those are the question we should be asking but it made me examine why READ MORE

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The First Ever Network Automation Conference – AutoCon0

First let me just say that you have got to love a zero indexed conference! If you are a network engineer and you don’t know what that means we need to chat..and that situation was a key topic of the conference. In my mind the goal of the conference was to assess the state of READ MORE

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How Network Engineers Can Manage Credentials and Keys More Securely in Python

For me, 2020 is going to be the year of taking my automation skills to the next level, and a Pandemic is not going to get in the way of that goal (much)! At the top of the list is handling credentials and API keys in a more secure fashion so lets look at how READ MORE

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Your Automation Skills will Travel Well

In 2020 our automation skills may be the only thing that does travel! What I mean is that the automation skills being evangelized by so many in the networking community (Kirk Byers, David Bombal, Nick Russo, Jason Edelman and the Network to Code team, Hank Preston and Cisco DevNet and many more ....) will serve READ MORE

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Getting Started with pyATS (and Genie)

What is Python Automated Test System (pyATS)? None of the answers I found to this question really made much sense to me initially. A Python3 based Test Automation and Validation Framework developed by Cisco (but open and extensible to any vendor) is probably the best short answer but still too vague. Add in Genie because, READ MORE

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Using Python and Pandas to look at Pandemic Data

The script and supporting files in this repository are intended to show how the Python Pandas module can be used to analyze data, specifically COVID-19 data. I am going to recommend 3 data sets to "investigate": WHO (Download from 06 April 2020) CSSEGISandData on GitHub New York Times US Data GitHub Repository Background WHO Data READ MORE

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How much network automation stuff should I learn as a network engineer? & Passing the DevNet Associates Exam

It is important to note that the question is not "should I learn any?" but rather "how much should I learn?". The new Cisco DevNet Certifications help us answer that question. Let me share my journey to that conclusion. In early February I decided to take the DevNet Associates Exam. I scheduled it for the READ MORE

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Configuration Creation with Nornir

I tend to assess automation tools in four different contexts which is, in fact, a very general networking and automation workflow: Discovery How easy is it to find out about the network, document its configuration (the configuration of a device itself) and state (show commands "snapshotting" its state)? Configuration Creation How easy is it to READ MORE

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Nornir – A New Network Automation Framework

nornir (formerly brigade) - A new network automation framework Before getting started, let me say that I'm big fan of Ansible. It is one of my go-to automation frameworks. Having said that, there have been use cases where I've run into some of the limitations of Ansible and to be fair some of those limitations may READ MORE

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Pandas for Network Engineers (Who doesn’t love Pandas? )

The module not the mammal! My original title for this article was going to be *Decomposing Pandas* as a follow on to *Decomposing Data Structures* but I was advised against that name. Go figure. One of the things I love most about Python is that its always waiting for me to get just a little READ MORE

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