CLI Still Sucks for Automation

Using network CLI for automation has always been fragile. But it keeps surprising me with the way it breaks. This time, it was a combination of Ansible, Arista, replace: config and terminal length used as a config command.

The Problem

I often hang out in the NTC Slack channel. A user reported they were having a problem with Ansible and EOS. Basic changes worked, but when they used eos_config with the replace: config option, it just timed out. We knew basic authentication & connectivity was fine, it had to be something else.

But it made no sense, because these modules are widely used. What’s going on?

Background #1: Pagination

Some commands produce more than one screen’s worth of output - for example, show run can be hundreds of lines long. Most screens don’t have hundreds of lines, so pagination is used. The network Continue reading

CLI Still Sucks for Automation

Using network CLI for automation has always been fragile. But it keeps surprising me with the way it breaks. This time, it was a combination of Ansible, Arista, replace: config and terminal length used as a config command.

The Problem

I often hang out in the NTC Slack channel. A user reported they were having a problem with Ansible and EOS. Basic changes worked, but when they used eos_config with the replace: config option, it just timed out. We knew basic authentication & connectivity was fine, it had to be something else.

But it made no sense, because these modules are widely used. What’s going on?

Background #1: Pagination

Some commands produce more than one screen’s worth of output - for example, show run can be hundreds of lines long. Most screens don’t have hundreds of lines, so pagination is used. The network Continue reading

What’s in a Container Platform?

Fresh off the heels of DockerCon and the announcement of Docker Enterprise 3.0, an end-to-end and dev-to-cloud container platform, I wanted to share some thoughts on what we mean when we say “complete container platform”.

Choice and Flexibility

A complete solution has to meet the needs of different kinds of applications and users – not just cloud native projects but legacy and brownfield applications on both Linux and Windows, too. At a high level, one of the goals of modernization – the leading reason organizations are adopting container platforms – is to rid ourselves of technical debt. Organizations want the freedom to create their apps based on the “right” stack and running in the “right” place, even though what’s “right” may vary from app to app. So the container platform running those applications should be flexible and open to support those needs, rather than rigidly tying application teams to a single OS or virtualization and cloud model.

High-Velocity Innovation

To deliver high velocity innovation your developers are a key constituent for the container platform. That means the container platform should extend to their environment, so that developers are building and testing on the same APIs that will be used Continue reading

History Of Networking – Pseudowires – Luca Martini

Luca Martini joins Network Collective to talk about his involvement in the creation and evolution of pseudowires in networking.
Luca Martini
Guest
Russ White
Host
Donald Sharp
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Pseudowires – Luca Martini appeared first on Network Collective.

BrandPost: Q&A: Blue Planet’s Andy Youé Talks Network Visualization and Automation

Christine Keck, Analyst Relations Leader, Ciena Andy Youé, Vice President for Sales & Delivery, Ciena Blue Planet Ciena Blue Planet now operates as its own division within Ciena. This news was announced on December 13, 2018, as part of Ciena’s Fiscal 2018 earnings call, and the decision took effect in November at the start of Ciena’s new fiscal year. This move was made to allow Ciena to continue honing our focus and resources on addressing the high-growth market opportunity for intelligent software automation.To read this article in full, please click here

The first step toward ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi: a laser-radio transmitter

Leaping toward the next generation of wireless-based data communications, researchers say they are making progress extracting and sending data using semiconductor lasers that churn out radio signals across multiple frequencies all at the same time. Data could conceivably be transmitted hundreds of time faster than today’s traditional Radio Frequency (RF) wireless, engineers believe.It’s the “first laser-radio transmitter,” Harvard University proclaims of its invention in an article on its John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) website.To read this article in full, please click here

Automation Should Prevent Operator Errors

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

One of the toughest tasks faced by networking engineers attending our Building Network Automation Solutions course is designing a data model describing network infrastructure or services. They usually think in terms of individual devices (nodes) resulting in tons of duplicated data.

I always point that out when reviewing their solutions and suggest how to minimize or eliminate duplicate data. Not surprisingly, doing that is hard, and one of the attendees started wondering whether the extra effort makes sense:

Read more ...

Secure forwarding of sFlow using ssh

Typically sFlow datagrams are sent unencrypted from agents embedded in switches and routers to a local collector/analyzer. Sending sFlow datagrams over the management VLAN or out of band management network generally provides adequate isolation and security within the site. Inter-site traffic within an organization is typically carried over a virtual private network (VPN) which encrypts the data and protects it from eavesdropping.

This article describes a simple method of carrying sFlow datagrams over an encrypted ssh connection which can be useful in situations where a VPN is not available, for example, sending sFlow to an analyzer in the public cloud, or to an external consultant.

The diagram shows the elements of the solution. A collector on the site receives sFlow datagrams from the network devices and uses the sflow_fwd.py script to convert the datagrams into line delimited hexadecimal strings that are sent over an ssh connection to another instance of sflow_fwd.py running on the analyzer that converts the hexadecimal strings back to sFlow datagrams.

The following sflow_fwd.py Python script accomplishes the task: 
#!/usr/bin/python

import socket
import sys
import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Serialize/deserialize sFlow')
parser.add_argument('-c', '--collector', default='')
parser.add_argument('-s', '--server')
parser.add_argument('-p', '--port', type=int, default=6343)
 Continue reading

Minipack Highlight Video from OCP Summit

Minipack is an open, modular super spine switch and is the most recent addition to the industry’s open modular switches. Paired with the flexibility and cost benefits of Cumulus Linux OS, the platform is ideal for deploying the next generation of high-capacity data center fabrics. Based on Broadcom’s StrataXGS Tomahawk III Switch Series, Minipack is more powerful than other chassis while occupying a smaller footprint.

Together, Cumulus Networks and Edgecore Networks are bringing the hyperscale that was once only available to the largest enterprises to an entirely new segment of the market with Minipack.

Listen to Brian Sullivan, Sr Director of Product Management at Cumulus Networks and Michael Lane, VP of Business Development at Edgecore Networks as they discuss the recently launched Minipack, open, modular switch.

Minipack Announcement Blog
Minipack Datasheet
Edgecore Networks Minipack launch Press Release
Please let me know if you have any comments or questions, or via Twitter at @CicconeScott.

Cisco releases a critical security patch for a virtualized automation tool

Cisco has released a  patch for a critical vulnerability in software used to control large virtual environments.The weakness gets a 10 out of 10 severity score and is found in Cisco’s Elastic Services Controller (ESC), which the company describes as offering a single point of control to manage all aspects of Virtual Network Functions and offers capabilities such as VM and service monitoring, auto-recovery and dynamic scaling. With ESC users control the lifecycle all virtualized resources, whether using Cisco or third-party VNFs, Cisco stated.RELATED: What IT admins love/hate about 8 top network monitoring tools The vulnerability in this case lies in the REST API of ESC and could let  an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication on the REST API and execute arbitrary actions through with administrative privileges on an affected system. The vulnerability is due to improper validation of API requests, Cisco wrote in its advisory.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco releases a critical security patch for a virtualized automation tool

Cisco has released a  patch for a critical vulnerability in software used to control large virtual environments.The weakness gets a 10 out of 10 severity score and is found in Cisco’s Elastic Services Controller (ESC), which the company describes as offering a single point of control to manage all aspects of Virtual Network Functions and offers capabilities such as VM and service monitoring, auto-recovery and dynamic scaling. With ESC users control the lifecycle all virtualized resources, whether using Cisco or third-party VNFs, Cisco stated.RELATED: What IT admins love/hate about 8 top network monitoring tools The vulnerability in this case lies in the REST API of ESC and could let  an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication on the REST API and execute arbitrary actions through with administrative privileges on an affected system. The vulnerability is due to improper validation of API requests, Cisco wrote in its advisory.To read this article in full, please click here

Backblaze report shows slight uptick in HDD failure rates

Cloud backup vendor Backblaze issued its latest quarterly findings for hard-disk drive (HDD) reliability, and it shows a slight uptick in failure rates — but hardly something to fret over.All told, Backblaze has 106,238 hard drives spinning in three data center colocations, and every quarter it highlights the failure rate of each model drive it uses. The company first came to prominence several years ago when it highlighted an abnormally high failure rate of Seagate drives.The problem arose about two years after massive floods in Thailand (around 2011) ruined the manufacturing facilities of several hard drive manufacturers, with Seagate taking it especially hard. I did some reporting back then for a now-defunct publication and found out that some corners were cut to get hard drive production going again and that those cuts resulted in a bunch of time bomb hard drives with higher than average failure rates.To read this article in full, please click here

1 … 1,239 1,240 1,241 1,242 1,243 … 3,841